Featuring modeling, animation, and rendering tools, NewTek LightWave 3D 2019 is a complete 3D animation solution for creating photo-realistic renders, 3D animations, visual effects, motion graphics, video game graphics, architectural visualizations, and product and advertising designs. An intuitive workflow simplifies the learning curve and use of the application to provide a more efficient user-experience focused on the artistic aspect of design. New features in LightWave 3D 2019 include real-time collaborative 3D interactivity through a bridge to Unreal Engine. LightWave 3D 2019 is compatible with Mac and Windows operating systems.
Many LightWave 3D artists are among the elite of VFX award-winners in the industry. LightWave has been used to create 3D illustrations for magazines such as TIME, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly. Famous LightWave designs include a CG image of a football stadium for a Hyundai commercial. Visual effects have been created in LightWave for numerous films, TV shows, and commercials, including Sleepy Hollow and Breaking Bad. And LightWave is commonly used in the 3D animation process for everything from modeling and beyond.
Note:
This upgrade version is valid for owners of any previous version of LightWave 3D.
New Features
- Real-time collaborative LightWave to Unreal Engine
- Metamorphic animated sculpting/painting
- Game development enhancements in Modeler
- Improved FBX Interchange
- OpenVDB creation
- New Primitive and Tools
- Shading and rendering enhancements
- Shading model customization tools
- Bone enhancements for game development
- Physical sky and sunlight
- Display scaling
- Workflow and UI enhancements
All Features
LightWave 3D Bridge to Unreal Engine
LightWave 3D 2019 enters the real-time age for interchange with this workflow link between the Unreal Engine and LightWave 3D, focusing on LightWave driving Unreal changes iteratively. Multiple LightWave seats are able to connect to the same Unreal editor simultaneously to enable real-time collaboration between artists. The bridge uses NewTek's proven NDI network discovery mechanism for easy automatic configuration and can be limited to single project use in Unreal, or installed as a general plug-in for use in all Unreal projects.
FBX and New Interchange Bridge
Work with industry-standard FBX data on a whole new level via the new Interchange Bridge. Interactively choose what to import / export and how. Add to existing FBX files from Layout and Modeler. Build LightWave 3D assets from many FBX files. Easily revisit FBX files via workspaces.
Shading Model Customization Tools
The ability to pull materials apart and build them to your tastes is new to LightWave 3D 2019. There is access to Fresnel functions, Material components, and Material integrators. The Material Tools Group has been updated with new nodes to support this capability.
OpenVDB Content Creation
LightWave 3D 2018 introduced the ability to import and render an OpenVDB fog volume. New for LightWave 3D 2019 is a set of node tools that allow OpenVDB content creation. You can now create OpenVDB grids from meshes, particles, and even the shape primitive distance estimator. The tool kit allows for live Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) operations grid filtering, including level-set tracking, smoothing, dilation, and erosion. Solvers are included that allow for fluid simulation and smoke and fire effects.
Metamorphic Animated Sculpting/Painting
Metamorphic is a multipurpose animatable mesh sculpting and vertex map manipulation plug-in for LightWave 3D 2019 that works in Layout and takes full advantage of the new capabilities of the modifier stack.
Display Scaling
Support for scaling many UI elements for HiDPI and large-screen displays. Independent scaling options for multi-monitor setups.
Bone Enhancements for Game Development
The new Bone Type option, Limited Bones, allows the animator to set a limit in Layout on the number of bones that affect a given point to match the limit in the target game engine, and it engages real-time optimizations to more closely match the performance game engines expect from a rig.
Edge Shader Node
A node for simulating beveled or rounded edges at render time, to give more realistic results without increasing geometry.
Patina Node
This node can add Wear (a convex shader) to a surface, or Dirt (concave) based on a radius and offset.
Procedural Shader Node
This node encapsulates a chosen legacy system LightWave 3D or third-party procedural texture and exposes it with the typical nodal inputs and outputs. Previously, such procedurals were only available inside a Procedural texture layer of a texture stack.
Image Caching
LightWave now uses smart caching with very high-resolution images, allowing artists to use them for textures and other uses, regardless of the memory in the computer system.
New Compositing Buffers
The new Rho buffer is for extracting lighting and shading information from the direct and indirect buffers. A new Weight buffer contains the value of the surface shader settings for both direct and indirect buffers. These are useful for heavy compositing work.
NVIDIA OptiX Denoising
A new Noise Filter option uses the NVIDIA OptiX library for AI-accelerated noise reduction when rendering still images. An NVIDIA card is required.
Despike
This new Renderer option is a tool for reducing or removing "fireflies" in renders.
Physical Sky
An Environment plug-in to replicate physically accurate skies and create otherworldly skies, with equal ease.
Physical Sunlight
A new Light Type that simulates a sun using state-of-the-art scientific methods.
Enhanced UV and UDIM Mapping Workflow
Modeler has added a suite of new tools for working with UV maps as well as UDIM tiled mapping.
Smoothing Groups
Modeler now supports the creation of smoothing groups within a mesh. Smoothing groups provide a way to create creases and hard edges, and more precisely control regional contours on your model. You are no longer limited to a single smoothing angle, adding extra control geometry, or breaking your model into parts to achieve the look you desire. Smoothing groups can be created automatically using a vertex normal map, imported with OBJ files, by using a smoothing angle threshold or manually. Smoothing groups can be exchanged with other software that supports the format.
Empty Volume Shape Primitive
LightWave 3D 2019 adds the new Shape Primitive, Empty Volume, which can be used for creating procedural surface shapes. In addition to being directly useful in scenes, the Empty Volume primitive is helpful in workflows that need to convert meshes to volumes or vice versa. Empty Volume can also provide for real-time Boolean operations in Layout.
New Tools for Shape Primitives
The Empty Volume shape primitive allows advanced users to write their own distance estimators for rendered SDF shapes and volumetrics. Other new nodal distance tools include Mobius, Capsule, Shape CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry), and SmoothMin, a soft blending node.
Expanded Layout Undo System
The Layout Undo System has been expanded to many of the systems involving Transforms & Keys. Unlimited Undo is now available in Graph Editor, Scene Editors (both new and classic), Dope Sheet, and many Layout navigation tools.
Pop-Up Menus
Menus can now be navigated via select keys and the mouse wheel. Large pop-up menus can be navigated with filtering and searches. Regular expressions can be used in filters. Also, you can now call up a flattened version of every entry that exists in the main menu with the keyboard shortcut "CTRL + Space". Doing so presents a list of all available commands in Layout or Modeler (with their associated keyboard shortcuts). As with other LightWave menus, you can type to narrow down your selection and the cursor keys and "Enter" can be used to choose the command you require.
Node Graph UI Options
Tidy Nodes Command is a tool to make 'cluttered' node trees 'straight' and easier to read from left to right automatically. With Background Grid, you can adjust the brightness and color of the grid in the Node Editor. Snap to Grid allows you to make the nodes 'snap' to a user-settable grid size.
Online Documentation
The LightWave 3D documentation now fits on any device you care to use it on.