This is much better than Morph Gizmo, Light Wave's previous facial animation tool, with which morphing occurred in a separate window and had to be saved to disk before showing up in Layout. A floating palette of sliders appears for the model, enabling you to interactively animate the shapes. It also means that the bone information is saved with the object, so if the model is revised, the skeletal information can be updated with the model.įor facial animation, Modeler now supports an IntelligEntity called Endomorphs, with which you can save morph data in the vertices of a single model rather than save each facial shape as a separate model, as you do in other packages. This is much easier than doing it in the animation and rendering module, Layout. One IntelligEntity called Skelegons adds the skeletal structure directly in the model so that you can use the tools in Modeler to build and manipulate a character's skeleton. In addition, the program's IntelligEntities enable you to create smart objects that understand animation. For instance, you can now weight points on a subdivision surface in order to affect the curvature of the surface, much like a NURBS patch. Modeling in LightWave has always been easy, and Version 6 adds some new tools to speed up the process. LightWave is a polygonal package that supports subdivision surfaces. Although this is a wonderful addition, it would be better if you could zoom in and out to get a better view of long animations, and if you could see the underlying animation curves as well. Much like the dope sheet in other applications, the Scene Editor enables you to view and edit the keyframes of multiple objects. To help with organization, LightWave 6 features a new window called the Scene Editor. I tested it using an Inter graph Wildcat 4105, and it worked great. This feature requires a beefy OpenGL card for optimal results. One of the best new interface tweaks is an OpenGL implementation that enables you to see shadows, textures, reflection, fog, and lens flares in real time as you work, rather than rendering them later or relying on test-renders. Notice how the reflected light from the sky and ground softly illuminates the dark The righthand image was rendered with Raydiosity. The image at left was lit with one backlight and rendered normally. The Raydiosity feature allows for realistic lighting. But recognizing that switching between the modules takes time, NewTek has introduced a feature called the Hub, which al lows changes in a model's shape to be reflected automatically in Layout, without the need to save and reload the model. LightWave 6 still consists of two separate modules, Modeler for modeling and Layout for animation and rendering.
![softimage3d wildcat softimage3d wildcat](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/51/2e/1c/512e1ca78ded5fb7757176ccf8e50f6c.gif)
Although LightWave is still not cutting edge in some places, it remains a solid workhorse that produces world-class images at an affordable price. The thoroughly overhauled LightWave 6 now competes more strongly with Alias|Wavefront's Maya, Avid's Softimage XSI, and Discreet's 3D Studio Max. LightWave has been a stalwart of the animation industry for more than a decade, but as with most decade-old packages, it was beginning to show its age.