12/23/2023 0 Comments Modeler newtek lightwave 3dLightWave has long had the ability to render different passes to separate layers in a layer Photoshop file, but you had little control over them. LightWave’s modeler remains fast, easy to use-and essentially unchanged for some time. When the art director wants “more shine” or a deeper shade of red, for example, having separate render passes to work with-reflection, specularity, diffuse color, etc.-lets you quickly tweak the final results in Photoshop rather than resetting and re-rendering your scene. It’s often useful, and sometimes necessary, to export different render passes separately. A simpler version of Fracture is available within Layout. Modeler has a new tool called Fracture, designed to support Bullet Physics by automatically breaking up your solid models into little bits so that Bullet can explode or collapse them. LightWave’s instancing creates hundreds, or even thousands of “clones” of an object without the memory overhead. It is great for bouncing balls, collapsing towers or, more practically, for scattering a ton of bolts across a tabletop without having to place each one individually. Bullet is an open-source physics engine, also available in Blender, Cinema 4D and other 3D applications. If you ever feel like smashing your models, you’ll be happy with LightWave’s new Bullet Physics. These flocks can be made up of static meshes, or they can use objects with animated behaviors. The new Flocking feature allows you to create large groups, swarms, flocks or herds of objects that move through your scene in a cohesive way-either following a path, or chasing or avoiding various goals. You can make them quite different from one another by adding random scaling, positioning and rotation, as well as applying different materials. These instances don’t have to be identical copies of the original. LightWave’s new Flock Generator automatically creates animated flocks of objects-here, a swarm of robot wasps. That’s not to say that those extra 499 meshes don’t impart a performance hit when it comes time to display them onscreen-I definitely felt it-but the memory hit is nil. The difference between, say, a single instance of a 1.6 million-polygon object and 500 instances of the same object is only on the order of 2 or 3MB. You could use instancing to cover a tabletop in ball bearings or machine screws, for example, or to create a vast array of cell phones stretching to the horizon. LightWave version 11 introduces Instancing-a way to create lots of copies of a single mesh without the usual memory overhead. He also says the company’s new site is being updated to include more support, including video tutorials and documentation files. When questioned about the installation and documentation issues, Rob Powers, president of the LightWave 3D Group, responded that the content, documentation, and files are now distributed with a digital download. Adding insult to injury, the web-based help option on the help menu took me to a non-existent website. Version 11’s help consists of addenda in PDF format. Despite the application having been shipping for half a year, there are no current help files. Once I reverted to Internet Explorer, I found the help files were actually for version 10. It turns out that the help files don’t like Google’s Chrome browser. Likewise, the help file loaded only blank pages. Are you kidding me? I really hope my problems were the result of my getting a very early release of the program. Windows does not handle multi-part archives natively, so my only options (and the actual procedure recommended in the docs) were to download and install third-party software, or use the command line mode to manually combine the two parts into a single file, then unzip them. Upon installation, I found the resources-models, scenes, textures, etc.-were on the disc in a two-part Zip archive. I started hitting hiccups before I got a chance to run the program. True to form, that’s where it’s put all the big improvements this time. However, the company says version 11.5 will include a number of new modeling features.įor the last several releases, NewTek has been pouring its resources into Layout, improving the rendering workflow, adding better cameras and lights, fur, etc. I’ve always liked LightWave’s modeler, which is fortunate, because it’s still the same modeler as was in version 10. I don’t mind this separation of the workflow, but it’s something that continues to chafe on the community. Layout is for everything else-rendering, animation, lighting, and so forth. Modeler is where you create your geometry. Despite age-old hints and promises to the contrary, LightWave remains two distinct applications: Modeler and Layout.
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