Home :: Software :: Macintosh  

Business & Office
Business & Office Management Software
Children's Software
Communication
Education & How-To
Games
Graphics
Home & Hobbies
Networking
Operating Systems & Utilities
Programming
Video & Music
Web Development
LightWave 3D 6.5 (ADB)

LightWave 3D 6.5 (ADB)

List Price:
Your Price:
Product Info Reviews

Description:

LightWave 3D 6.5 is a powerful animation-production package for professionals. It is built upon the fast, accurate 3-D Inverse Kinematics (IK) engine. It features radiosity, caustics, subdivision surface animation, Skelegons, and thousands of enhancements. LightWave 6.5 is a robust tool set for manipulating these surfaces, including interactive modifiers that allow you to model in multiple "soft" modes. LightWave also allows you to sculpt "digital clay" by directly manipulating it at the vertex level, controlling groups of points or polygons with an extreme list of operators. Real-time subdivision surfaces, extensive texturing tools, character animation tools, HyperVoxels, and ray tracing are all incorporated into an extremely powerful animation system.

There are many new features and enhancements in version 6.5. There is now a UV texture atlas for automated complex UV map creation, continuous and discontinuous UV mapping, and light and texture baking. Bone deformations have been significantly optimized and are now up to 40 times faster. In the Motion Designer, a soft-body dynamics engine is now integrated seamlessly into the interface. There is also an integrated particle system, open GL transparency, enhanced texturing, and improved Bezier handling and general speed optimizations in Graph Editor. There is a powerful new integrated expressions system, including an expressions tree view in the Graph Editor.

Improvements to HyperVoxels include fast 2-D sprite mode and new HyperVoxels effects. The new noise-reduction tool in layout greatly improves the render quality of zero-tolerance radiosity and area-linear light shadows. This allows for much higher-quality radiosity output at lower radiosity settings, resulting in greatly reduced render times. Volumetric Antialiasing in the effects panel allows the user to disable this feature. This allows for much lower render times when utilizing volumetrics. The volumetrics tools have many improvements, including a new Cast Shadows option in the volumetric lights panel, which will cast shadows caused by the light opacity.

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates