LightWave 3D Graphics Design 2020.0.2

LightWave 3D has been used in the television industry for a long time and it is one of the big players in the 3D animation software market. Specially designed for professional artists, it comes bundled with advanced modeling and rendering tools.

This is a complete 3D solution to model, render, and animate. Used extensively in broadcast television production, film visual effects, video game development, print graphics, and visualization, LightWave 3D is responsible for more artists winning Awards than any other 3D application.

Workflow enhancements and powerful new tools solve your animation and design challenges and streamline your creative process. Direct and robust, LightWave 3d 2020 serves the artist first, for visual effects, motion graphics, game development, architectural visualization, product design, and advertising.

These days, with the creative process, artists need to move at maximum speed to tackle incredible deadlines, demanding work, and high expectations. Using the app, either exclusively or in a pipeline, makes it possible for an individual, a small team or a major facility to see their dreams and ideas come to life, with award-winning quality work, on time and budget. NewTek LightWave artists all over the world say they can count on it for speed, flexibility, value, and control.

Just like other professional-level animation suites, its complexity makes the learning curve a bit steep for beginners, but that is a minor drawback compared to its complete set of features.

Providing Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) functionality, This software allows you to get an idea of the final look of your projects as you work. The advanced editing tools enable you to modify scenes, surfaces, images, and graphs to create realistic customized graphics, models, and amazing animations.

Among the advantages of the program is its capacity to seamlessly integrate with similar software, allowing you to import and export objects from and to other modeling applications.

Lightwave 3D Graphics Design Features

Modeling
The toolset the standard for polygonal, subdivision surface modeling a decade before many of the other 3D software packages included even basic polygonal modeling tools. While others were basing their pipelines on clunky spline-patching workflows, The app artists were quickly and efficiently modeling with smooth subdivision surfaces interactively. The program continues to offer powerful, rock-solid modeling tools and the latest versions of the appraise the bar with increased interactivity and ease of use.

Surfacing
The software offers two surfacing systems to the artist. A fast, simple to use the layer-based system, and a very flexible and powerful nodal system. Each offers different workflows to suit the artist – for quick results, the layered system is perfect for fast visualization and concept design. For those who like to dig deep, the nodal system offers ultimate creative freedom. These systems can be used independently of each other, but unique to the app is the ability to mix them. You can use the layered surfacing to achieve results quickly, then choose any of the surface properties to use in a nodal context. This allows you to create extremely complex results very quickly. The node system also includes easy to use physically accurate material shaders for glass, metal, skin, and car paint, allowing you to achieve photoreal results quickly.

Rigging
The rigging tools in the app are fast and flexible and again offer artists choices in workflow. This software pioneered a very powerful and easy to set up automatic joint influence falloff system. This means that you can either choose to setup industry standard weight maps for your characters and rigged geometry or you can elect to bypass that often time-consuming weight mapping process for quick visualization and concept design animation workflows by using the automatic joint falloff that is built into the product’s animation system. This allows you to quickly and easily swap out geometry in rigs with zero weight map hassles. But you always have the choice to work with weight maps for that added control when your project requires it.

Animation
The program includes powerful procedural, nodal, and keyframe animation tools. An easy to use and customizable keyframe graph editor allows you to quickly place and edit keys, time scale, filter, and even manipulate your animations with expressions. Bake your animations per keyframe or with frame stepping and create motion clips to blend within the non-linear motion mixer. You can even bake animations to Autodesk geometry cache or industry standard MDD files to simplify the scene for rendering or for export to other animation packages. For the facial animation, the software includes an efficient blend-shape system called Endomorphs which includes all of your morph targets within your base object. Endomorphs can even be sculpted in ZBrush using the new ZBrush GoZ interchange tools included in the program.

Virtual Studio Tools
The app’s development team is bridging the gap between real and virtual worlds, by bringing together the broadest array in any application of new devices with which to interact with the set and characters inside the tool’s virtual stage and model shop. Device support ranges from economical mice, tablets, and game system controllers to the sensor arrays and custom cameras and devices used to let directors, lighting grips, and camera operators walk a real set and fully capture their data into the virtual set modeled in LightWave for PC. Applications range from propelling your camera on an architectural flythrough using a 6DoF mouse to puppeteering your characters live on stage using Playstation Move controllers, to recording every camera move shot for a major motion picture, a technique pioneered on the film Avatar.

Instancing
Instancing allows vast duplication of objects in a scene with very little overhead. With instancing, huge ‘virtual’ polygon counts can be achieved allowing the artist to populate their scenes with incredible detail, yet retain reasonable render times and memory usage. While instances can be thought of as clones of the original source objects, they do not need to look identical. They can be randomly scaled, positioned, rotated, and even surfaced entirely differently from the source, allowing for a huge variety of uses.

The software can design 3D objects, add gravity and wind effects, simulate lighting effects (refraction, reflection, etc.) and configure motion paths. Populate scenes with incredible details using multiple instances of a certain item and create realistic natural motion effects with the Flock controller.

Especially designed for game developers, the integrated Bullet dynamics engine can help you build complex animations, featuring 3D collision detection and real dynamics. Together with the Fracture tool, it enables you to fine-tune breaking objects, such as explosion pieces.

The application comes with a wide range of rendering options (wireframe, texture, shade, stretch, and more) and a powerful particle engine that makes it easy to create detailed and photo-realistic animations. In addition, you can set the program to run rendering tasks across networked PCs, thus saving time.

Together with Lscript, the application also supports Python, C, C++, or C# programming languages, which makes it a versatile development tool.

LightWave 3D is an all-in-one must-have tool for every 3D modeler out there. Its professional modeling features and the virtual camera, together with the powerful rendering engine make it a complete solution for creating 3D scenes. All the tools are there, the only limit is your imagination.

System Requirements

Technical Specification