Please click below to view LightWave 3D Project List :

http://www.newtek-europe.com/uk/products/lightwave/projects.html

LightWave 3D is the common denominator between an architect in Egypt who brings his building designs to vivid life, complete with furnishings, landscaping and people, a game artist in Croatia who produced the multi-award winning Serious Sam, and an animator in Dallas whose two-minute short gave birth to an Oscar-nominated CGI movie. Bring anything to life from buildings to characters with the broad range of tools included in LightWave right out of the box, ready to go.

LightWave’s tools are designed for fast productivity and easy, intuitive use. They are set in an interface that you can customize to your needs, so the tools you use most are right where you want them. Buttons are plainly labeled with the names of the tools so you know what they do instantly, not with cryptic icons that take months to decipher and memorize. Nothing in the industry is faster to learn, easier to use, or more productive. And no other 3D application has the world’s fastest and most beautiful renderer, built-in.

For Print Graphics

The right image can be the critical element in putting a story across, in making the abstract understandable, the distant immediate, the imagined real. Whether an image is intended to simply inform or to pack emotional punch, NewTek’s LightWave 3D® offers the range of control in building the basic elements, composing the shot, and designing the final look, for creating compelling print graphics for any purpose.

Modeling
LightWave 3D® is a true, real-time subdivision surface modeler. With the ability to model in any viewport, including the perspective view, and a host of fully interactive tools such as extrude, bevel, smooth shift, lathe, drag, magnet, and more, modeling becomes like sculpting with clay. In addition, LightWave® offers spline modeling, sketch tools, booleans, unlimited layers, use of background images for reference, and import of EPS and other file types.

Rendering
LightWave® offers, quite simply, one of the best renderers available. Computing massive amounts of data at floating-point accuracy ensures color depth that results in extremely high-quality imagery. With raytracing, radiosity, caustics, soft reflections and refractions, a variety of depth-of-field and motion blur tools, the LightWave® renderer is powerful and flexible enough to produce photographic realism or sublime fantasy.

Infinite Layered Textures
LightWave® allows as many layers of texturing as needed on an object or surface, and provides perfect control of how the layers are combined in the final renders. Textures can be colors selected from a palette, images, or any of dozens of included procedurals. Textures can be applied for color, bump, or displacement, using a variety of projections or UV Mapping.

For Game Design

Video games are on the fast track to becoming the largest segment of the entertainment industry. This growth creates a lot of opportunity for 3D graphic designers, and NewTek’s LightWave® provides the tools to take advantage of that opportunity.

LightWave®’s Modeler has long held the title as the world’s best polygonal modeler; game developers find this a major weapon in creating efficient, yet great-looking, models for fast, exciting game-play. LightWave®’s advanced UV mapping, weight maps, gradient controls, and motion and texture baking all contribute to this powerful arsenal.

Subdivision Surfaces
With a tap of the tab key, your model changes from a 30-polygon faceted rough to an organically rounded, smooth, flowing sculpture: a head or a body, human, animal, or alien; a cool sports car; or a techno-organic spaceship perhaps. Subdivision surfaces provide modeling as complex as you need with great economy of effort and time. It allows you to model with simple polygons at a fraction of the number the final model will need. You have complete control with a simplicity and ease you would never have expected when creating complex natural or engineered objects.

Inverse Kinematics
LightWave® lets you use virtual bones to quickly and easily make a skeleton for your character, and use FK and IK to move the character. FK and IK? Forward Kinematics: rotate the upper arm, and the forearm, hand and fingers must follow. Inverse Kinematics: put a "goal" just at the end of the fingers, and then if you want your character to reach for that M&M on the table, just move the goal toward the M&M, and the character’s arm will move in proper fashion. These can be combined for realistic movement in any situation. And LightWave®’s "Faster Bones" option makes animating a complex character quick and responsive.

Nonlinear Animation
LightWave® also includes a nonlinear animation tool, Motion Mixer. Previously saved motion cycles such as walking, running, jumping, etc., can be mixed and matched, stretched and shortened as needed to produce just the movement and timing you need for your project. Animate once, customize endlessly.

For Independent Film

Getting the most power for your money is the key to successful independent film production and to succeeding in business as an independent 3D graphics and animation artist. LightWave 3D® provides more for the independent producer or artist than any other package on the market.

The first off-the-shelf general 3D package used to model, texture and render a complete CGI animated film (the Oscar-nominated Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) was also the first to include a cel shader, the first to include subdivision surfaces, the first to include radiosity, and the first to include high-dynamic-range image and light support. And there are a host of other firsts along the way. NewTek’s LightWave 3D® is the leader in extending the borders of the possible in professional 3D in creation, animation, and rendering. And you can count on NewTek to keep pushing those boundaries for you.

Cel Shaders
LightWave 3D® offers a choice of shaders to suit the look you need for those projects where you want to achieve the look of traditional animation. Super Cel Shader and BESM ("Big Eyes Small Mouth" - can you say "Anime"?) provide the power to get the effect you want in smooth-shaded rendering with a "hand-painted" look.

Motion Designer
Soft-body dynamics are integrated in LightWave 3D®, and can be used to create realistic flowing movement for cloth, jello, flesh, hair or other materials. Motion Designer includes a variety of standard material selections such as thin cotton, thick cotton, rubber, and more, and you can customize the characteristics of your materials as well. You can adjust settings for the effect of gravity, wind, and more.

For Architecture and Visualization

Need to turn a design into an image that lets a client really see what the building will look like, inside and out? Or do you want to make to make it possible for an online shopper to peek inside the computer they are considering and view it from all sides? NewTek’s LightWave 3D® is your solution.

Radiosity
LightWave®'s radiosity offers a powerful simulation of the way light actually behaves, bouncing from surface to surface, so surfaces subtly color one another, take on the inner glow of reality, and shadows soften and take on a natural look. A variety of controls let you achieve just the effect you want, and the radiosity solutions can be cached or even baked into image maps, for major savings in rendering time.

HDRI
Most rendering engines limit you to just 256 levels of brightness to express a world where luminosity actually ranges across orders of magnitude from a pitch black cavern to the searing face of the sun. LightWave 3D® includes High-Dynamic-Range Image and light support, so using or creating images with thousands of levels of luminance is easy. In combination with LightWave®’s radiosity renderer, the results are stunningly photo-real. Completely computer-generated images look as though they were snatched from the real world. You’ll feel you can step right into the picture, and know just how everything will feel to the touch.

SkyTracer
With Skytracer, you can enter real-world parameters and create sophisticated atmospheric effects. Settings are available for characteristics of the atmosphere, sun, and clouds, and for time and location settings to accurately simulate the sun rising or setting, in this world or another. Skytracer accurately simulates light scattering and light absorption in the atmosphere.

For Broadcast, Film and Visual Effects

Beginning in 1993 with the FX Emmy for Babylon 5’s pilot episode, and on through today with the Emmy winners for both 2001 FX categories, Star Trek: Voyager and Frank Herbert’s Dune, productions using NewTek’s LightWave 3D® have included a string of award-winners and nominees at local, national, and international levels. Several of the other 2001 Emmy nominees used LightWave 3D®, as well as 2001 Oscar nominee for Best Animated Picture, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.

Whether you are flying logos, creating broadcast bumpers or animating the invasion of the Earth by an alien species from two blocks down and three universes over, with complete and utter realism (or even just for fun!), LightWave 3D® is the proven tool of choice.

Caustics
The dance of light on both the rippling surface and the hazy floor of the pool. The mysterious glints and reflections within and around a glass filled with liquid, sitting on a table. Hold a ring of gold in your fingers, under a light; move, and watch the play of highlights inside its circle and on your shaded palm. Caustics. The way light is reflected, refracted, and focused in the real world by curved or transparent surfaces. Native to LightWave 3D®, naturally.

HyperVoxels
HyperVoxels are NewTek’s breakthrough approach to creating volumetric effects such as liquids, fire, smoke, clouds, dust, gelatin, rusted materials, short hair and fur, and much more. HyperVoxels can also work in conjunction with ParticleFX to add dynamics to your effects. HyperVoxels’ "3D pixels" offer three modes, so you can design effects that you can move the camera through, or just view from outside, near or far. With these modes nearly any effect and level of detail that you need can be achieved, with efficient use of your rendering resources.

Sasquatch Lite
With Sasquatch Lite, you can create grass, fur, hair, leaves, and more. You can fine-tune the coarseness, frizziness, length, lean or "fall" direction, color, and much, much more. Long strand fiber objects such as long hair or grass skirts can be created using chains of two point polygons, and Motion Designer can be applied to supply the natural movement, complete with wind and gravity effects. Long hair can be as simple or complex as needed, including creating knots, bows, or even braids.

For New Media

CDs, DVDs, the Web…graphics, video and animations are now targeted to a host of new media, using a wide variety of formats. LightWave 3D® offers support built-in or via third party add-ons for virtually all the formats you may need to use.

Shockwave3D Exporter
NewTek’s LightWave® can export a scene, complete with images, objects, surfaces, and animation as a Macromedia® Shockwave® file that can integrated into Macromedia Director® as a Cast Member. This lets a user combine the content creation tool set of LightWave® with the interactive functionality of Macromedia Director to get an integrated solution for creating and distributing multimedia content.

QuickTime VR
LightWave® supports QuickTime Virtual RealityTM, which is a special type of QuickTime movie that lets a user view a 3D object from any angle, using the mouse to control the point of view.

File Formats
Supported image formats: PSD, Alias, BMP, Cineon FP, Flexible Image Format, IFF, JPEG, PCX, PICT, PNG, Radiance, RLA, RPF, SGI, Sun, TIFF, Targa, VBP, and YUV image formats. Supported animation formats: AVI (any installed codec), QuickTime, QuickTime Stereo, RTV (VT®), Flexible Image Format, Storyboard, 4X Storyboard, Film Expand. Supported Web 3D: QuickTimeVR, VRML and Shockwave for export. Modeler imports EPS, 3DS, OBJ, DXF, and FACT, and exports 3DS, OBJ, DXF, and VRML.

LightWave 3D 8 Feature List

LAYOUT

• More powerful and flexible character animation setup, controls, tools and workflow
  • New Bone Editing Tools
    • Enter Bone Edit Mode
    • Exit Bone Edit Mode
    • Joint Move
    • Tip Move
    • Bone Split
    • Bone Fuse
    • Bone Connect
    • Bone Twist
    • Align Pitch
    • Delete Bone
    • Unparent Bone
    • Bones On
    • Bones Off
    • Record Piv Rot
    • Remove RPR
    • Remove Pivot Pos
    • Delete Hierarchy
    • Copy Hierarchy
    • Mirror Hierarchy
    • Rename Hierarchy
    • Scale Hierarchy
    • Export Hierarchy
    • Import Hierarchy
• Faster IK, FK
• New Morph Mixer
• JointMorph Plus
• Dynamics
  • Rigid Body Dynamics
  • Improved Soft Body Dynamics
  • Improved Cloth Dynamics
  • Bone Dynamics
  • Improved Particle System Tools
• Workflow
  • New Scene Editor with integrated Spreadsheet and Dope Sheet
  • Dope Track
  • Node-based Expression Editor
  • Envelope Contextual Menus
  • Move TCB
  • MultiMirror
  • Multi-selection of Texture Editor Layers
• The Ever-Popular "And More!"
  • Animatable UV coordinates
  • Rendering Enhancements

• New Selection Modes
  • Select Loop
  • Select Poly
  • Select Outline
  • Select Ring
  • Invert Connected
• New Layer Tools
  • Clone2 Layer
  • Insert Layer
  • Delete Layer
  • Object Collapser
• New Modeling Tools
  • New Create Tab Tools
    • Star Sphere
  • New Modify Tab Tools
    • Translate Plus
    • Move Plus
    • Segment Scale
    • Point Normal Move
  • New Multiply Tab Tools
    • Cut
    • Divide
    • Make Pole
    • Extender Plus
    • SuperShift
  • New Construct Tab Tools
    • Bridge Tool
  • New Detail Tab Tools
    • Edge Tools
    • Fix Poles
    • Fix 3-5
  • New Setup Tab Tools
    • Rotate Skelegons
  • New Utilities Tab Tools
    • Create JointMorph
• Encore for: The Ever-Popular "And More!"

• Inline Help System
• Enhanced OpenGL
• Speed and Workflow Optimizations
• Incremental Saving and Autosaving
• New File Formats
• Integration Tools
• Improvements to LScript scripting language and to the API

LightWave 3D® includes a CD-ROM full of license-free objects, images, textures and scenes.

System Requirements:

• Windows:
• System Processor Pentium III or higher (Pentium IV recommended)
• Operating System: 2000 (Sp3), XP (Sp1)
• TCP/IP Network Protocol Installed
• System RAM: 512 MB (1GB recommended)
• 230MB available harddrive space (not including content)
• CD-ROM drive for installation
• Graphics Card:
  • AGP slot interface
  • Full Open OpenGL and DirectX support
  • Latest drivers from chipset manufacturer
  • 1024x768 minimum screen resolution (1280x1024 recommended)
  • 64MB onboard dedicated RAM per display (128MB recommended)

Macintosh:

• System configuration: G4 or higher (G5 recommended)
• Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.3 (Panther)
• System RAM: 512 MB for OS X (1GB recommended)
• 230MB available harddrive space (not including content)
• Graphics Card:
  • Full OpenGL support
  • Latest drivers from chipset manufacturer
  • 1024x768 minimum screen resolution (1280x1024 recommended)
  • 64MB onboard dedicated RAM per display (128MB recommended)