Monday 04 Sep 2006
- platform PC, Mac
- price £499 ;£259 (upgrade from version 8/8.5) ;£299 (upgrade from previous version)
- company NewTek
- pros Complete production-ready 3D animation package. Improved rendering, n-gon support in subdivision surfaces.
- cons Workflow relies on plug-ins. No simple way to do object-instancing in Layout. Modeler doesn’t support OpenGL 2.0.
- rating
LightWave 3D has a long heritage in the computer graphics industry, and this latest release makes some important core improvements. The program’s popularity has continued to grow in recent years, despite the suggestion from long-time users that it has started to show its age over the last few versions.
Recent releases may prove to be a transitional period for the company. After the software’s original development team left NewTek at version 7.5 to set up Luxology, the company had to pick up the pieces to get LightWave 8 out. Now, version 9 seems to underpin NewTek’s commitment to ongoing development and modernization of LightWave.
The two major changes in this release are a new rendering engine, and the inclusion of an improved subdivision surfaces algorithm. The latter uses the Catmull-Clark scheme, developed by Edwin Catmull of Pixar and computer scientist Jim Clark.
This algorithm finally adds support for n-gons – bringing LightWave in line with other major players in the 3D market.
Click image for larger version
Tech notes: OpenGL 2.0
LightWave 3D 9 features support for OpenGL 2.0, improving 3D performance and allowing lighting scenarios to be previewed
in viewports.
In a test scene we converted a polygon object of 17,666 faces to level 3 subdivision surfaces and keyframed it in the Layout module to rotate over 90 frames. We repeated the same test in Cinema 4D with display and scene settings closely matched.
LightWave took 32 seconds while Cinema 4D took 57 seconds, so in this test is seems LightWave can shift and display subdivision surfaces pretty quickly. The combination of new subdivision surfaces and OpenGL 2.0 produced almost twice the performance of Cinema 4D in this test.
The new OpenGL 2.0 implementation means LightWave can display multiple levels of texture detail in Layout. This should be a big help when designing surfaces, and should cut down the need to test render when you want some visual feedback. In addition to displaying textures the new system can display procedural textures directly in the viewport. You can set transparency sorting by object or by polygon for more accurate display of transparency in the viewport. Overall the performance gets a big boost, allowing LightWave to take advantage of the latest graphics cards.
