NewTek's LightWave 3D 9 Reviewed, is LightWave 3D Truly Reborn?
by Tim Dunn

LightWave 9 – LightWave Reborn! That’s how Texas based NewTek has announced the most recent release of their 3D application LightWave version 9.0. It’s touted as the largest, most aggressive, most stable release of LightWave ever and with a new features list about a page long it’s easy to see that there has been a lot of work put into this new release.

But not on the LightWave 9 features list itself is the single most important new thing from NewTek, the beginnings of a whole new application. LightWave has been around for many, many years. Its saw its light shine way back in the early days of computer based modeling and animation. Over these long years, in an industry that seems to change, grow and evolve almost on a daily basis the core architecture of LightWave has seen addition but not really change. Beginning with LightWave 9 we are beginning to see a shift in the core programming code to handle the ever more intense and exciting technologies that rattle and rock today’s CG industry. Along with this change NewTek promises to show speed increases, new features and bug fixes that have plagued LightWave for years.

LightWave is still divided into two main applications, Modeler and Layout which is some what connected via a Hub. This, at least as of right now, is the direction that NewTek is still heading. With release 9 we are beginning to see the bounds between the two applications to somewhat shrink with a limited set of Modeling capabilities now available in Layout. This is not the holy grail of complete modeling inside of Layout that many are seeking, yet basic features are available to allow animators to add some primitive geometry control into their scenes without having to switch to Modeler and then synchronize their Modeler with their Layout scene. One area LightWave has been excessively blessed with is a third party plugin development community and with the new modeling capability in Layout and some exposure in LightWave's SDK we will probably be seeing some growth to Layout’s modeling capabilities coming soon.

LightWave's Modeler itself has seen some long asked for additions make it into the modeling pipeline. Chief among these answered requests is the addition of Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. Catmull-Clark subd’s allow the ability for Modeler to now work with n-gons, polygons which have more then 4 vertices (see image 1.) This is a feature that is common in most other 3D applications but until now has been missing from LightWave. Modeler even lets you choose whether you wish to work with normal subd’s or with Catmull-Clark subd’s. The addition of this new feature is a major boon to certain types of modeling. However not all of LightWave's modeling tools currently work with Catmull-Clark subd’s. Modeler has a huge number of modeling tools and an even larger list of third party plugins which still need to be re-written to take advantage of this new feature. Another thing to note about Catmull-Clark sub’d work is that it does take longer to run through the calculations since more advanced math is needed to handle the breaking down of non-quad polygons into renderable units.

[Image 1 – Showing New Catmull-Clark Subdivisions and selected Edges (shown in orange). Note all images show the New ‘Production Studio Style’ menu configurations at their default settings.]