NewTek to release LightWave 11.

If you have ever watched any of the great sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek Voyager / Deep Space Nine or Enterprise, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica or Stargate SG-1 you have witnessed some of the impressive 3D effects and animations NewTek's 'LightWave 3D' can accomplish. Another great example is Nickleodeon's animated series 'Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius', which was created by DNA Productions using LightWave 6 and Fori Owurowa's Messiah Studio.

On 11.11.2011 NewTek announced the new LightWave 11 and introduced a pre-release version, an advanced beta form, for their registered users and hardCORE members. The final release was slated for late December but I suspect they're not gonna make that deadline after all, so it seems like we're gonna get another present early next year! LightWave 11 will ship with some great new features like a Virtual Preview Renderer for onscreen real-time rendering and an 'Anaglyph Stereoscopic Preview' for real-time interocular anaglyphic 'red-blue' seperations. Here are some of the newly added features which will be used to create the coolest sci-fi shows of the coming years:

Instancing and Flocking.

You can now duplicate vast number of objects in a scene with very little memory overhead. Scale, position, rotate, and surface randomly cloned objects for realistic detail and create huge polygon groups with great detail while retaining reasonable render times.
Using a new motion modifier you can now animate realistic motion of grouped objects such as birds, fish, insects, animals, aircraft, spaceships, and more. With Flocking you can calculate crowd avoidance of neighboring objects, target alignment, and cohesive attractions.

Bullet Dynamics and Fracture.

Bullet is a fast, production proven, open source physics engine that is used in many high profile, effects-driven films and real-time game engines. Bullet features 3D rigid body dynamics originally created by Erwin Coumans. LightWave 11 features the Bullet dynamics engine directly in Layout so that it can be used with the new Fracture tool in Modeler to create compelling physics-based animation. Things like collapsing buildings, explosions, and even natural placement of items in a random pattern, would otherwise be difficult to do by hand.

A new Modeler tool that is designed to complement Bullet Dynamics in Layout will let you Pre-fracture objects that are ready for destruction. There are a number of different methods and associated settings to fine tune the look of the pieces as they are broken up. You also have the ability to create an Endomorph of the resulting fracture, which means you can animate the explosion, with or without using dynamics.Weight maps can also be applied to the source object to control the density of where the fracturing takes place.

Virtual Studio and Interchange Tools.

LightWave 11 includes support for new controller types, such as the Sony PlayStation Move and allows users to easily control and record the item results with a LightWave channel. The Virtual Studio Tools first made an appearance in LightWave 10, as a way of using third party controllers to animate items in your scene. LightWave 11 expands on this concept by allowing more controller types. Also, and this is very important: the new LightWave will be able to import and export model and texture data to Pixologic ZBrush software with GoZ technology!

GoZ is an interchange technology from Pixologic, that allows applications to send model and texture data to and from ZBrush for sculpting detail on a base mesh. The GoZ implementation in LightWave Layout and Modeler allows you to exchange model data, along with all the associated texture maps. The Modeler implementation even lets you use ZBrush for sculpting Endomorphs for things like facial morphs. Check out NewTek's awesome demo below to see all the new features in action!




NewTek, founded in 1985 in Topeka, Kansas by Tim Jenison, became famous for their award winning post-production video tools and live broadcasting hardware such as the NewTek TriCaster. In 1986 Paul Montgomery left Video Game producer Electronic Arts (EA) for NewTek and helped turn it into one of the most acclaimed desktop video pioneers with the release of the 'Video Toaster' in 1990, which won the Emmy Award for Technical Achievement in 1993. Montgomery became Vice President of NewTek, but unfortunately died at the early age of 39 of a sudden heart attack in 1999. He is listed as one of the 25 most influential people in the history of video development. The company is now based in San Antonio, Texas.

LightWave 3D was originally designed by Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson in 1988 as 'Videoscape' for Aegis Software. It was incorporated into the 'Video Toaster' at it's release in 1990 as 'LightWave 3D'. Since LightWave 3D 8 in 2005, a 64 bit version is available and unlike other 3D software packages, LightWave consists of 2 seperate modules: 'Modeler' to build 3D models and 'LayOut' to create animations and render them out.