NewTek is also looking at how it handles Inverse Kinematics through character animation, expressions, deformations and more. Many of these issues will be addressed in Lightwave v9.2 with planned upgrades through a core restructure of the system. I included on my continuing wish list for LightWave the added ability to handle larger scenes in OpenGL without bogging down and a more seamless approach to character animation. There are dozens of other advances in Lightwave 9, including an improved render engine, a potent Relativity 2 tool for easy expressions, N-Gons (support for polygons of more than four sides) improved character animation, a Surface Baking Camera to bake all shading and lighting qualities onto a scene (for faster rendering), Z-Brush support, vastly boosted dynamics (Hypervoxels) and many more. Very handy to increase overall speed and reduce render times. In Pixels per Polygon mode APS can add or reduce detail to objects of a scene dependent on how close the camera comes to them. An important thing to note here is that the Node Editor is an open SDK for third parties to make their own node products including new shader nodes for rendering.Īdaptive Pixel Subdivision (APS) is another large advance to control model detail by expressions, number input, envelopes, gradients, displacements or combos of these to create ultra-complex effects like fur, landscapes, human hair and so on. I ran a number of Shaders and 3D texture effects for an interactive eye feast. Experimentation can be as easy and fun as hooking nodes together for clever results that may be animated, saved and customized. The bottom line here is that 3D effects, looks and animations are achieved in a simple graphical way through nodes that would require far more laborious workarounds otherwise. The Node Editor workflow here enables results that would have been difficult to impossible before v9.įor those of you who don’t already know this, Nodes are a paradigm made popular in other 3D and 2D packages for a networked decision tree-style workflow that can produce sophisticated results visually instead of thru scripts or programming. The new Node Editor is the defining star and most compelling new feature of v9, with improvements particularly noticeable across the surface materials, volume light effects and displacements functions.

Newtek lightwave 3d 9