Product Reviews

LightWave 9.0 was one of the major releases in the program's history, making the application slicker and allaying the fears aroused by the departure of the engineers who went on to found Luxology.

Version 9.3 builds on the new foundation, and is the first universal binary version of the application, to boot. NewTek claims that the GUI now takes advantage of the latest Mac OS X developments, with all-new menu handling and screen drawing for a faster and more responsive user experience - and it seems to be right.

But one small gripe first: NewTek has changed the way the program is licensed. You now have to enter the licence key from a menu in Layout, rather than using the RegisterLightWave.app. A simple ReadMe with the download would have saved a lot of frustration. Both Modeler and Layout now handle the content directory path more sensibly, offering to set it automatically to the directory of the current object or scene that's being loaded. There's a nicer anti-aliased interface font (although we wish there was some option to make the font and buttons bigger for really hi-res monitors), and Modeler finally gets Advanced OpenGL support like Layout. Its OpenGL speed is now the same as Layout's, although we noticed Layout slowing down quite a bit with multiple Shaded OpenGL ports open.

Modeler's toolset remains essentially unchanged, although it has a few new tools, such as Create Rows. This is essentially edge-based extrusion, allowing the creation of flat planes or even cellular structures. Then there's the untangle tool, which tries to create a circular polygon from a set of quad polys. Some new selection options have been added, such as Select Entire Surface, Select Outline Points (and Edges) and Loop Expand and Contract. As usual, these additions don't appear to be very useful until you start using them, and then you wonder how you managed without them.

The node-based materials system introduced in LightWave 9 was very sophisticated - so sophisticated, in fact, that it now warrants an entire manual of its own alongside Layout and Modeler. Version 9.3 has added some new nodes that will prove very useful. There's a new Kappa node for sub-surface scattering (SSS) that promises to be faster. SSS is used for transmissive materials

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- try shining a torch through your earlobe to get an idea of what this means. There's also a new Dielectric node that uses Beer's law to produce very realistic glass-like surfaces, and a one-stop skin shader with separate settings for both epidermis and subdermis characteristics.

Layout also gets a slew of new Advanced Cameras. Anti-aliasing with the new cameras requires a single pass for all levels, because - unlike the Classic camera - the renderer doesn't have to reconstruct the geometry for each anti-aliasing pass. There's now also a Real Lens Camera that lets you choose not only the lens type, but also the manufacturer and the camera body type, to get as close as possible to the real thing (important in shot matching). Of particular note to artists in the building visualisation market is the Shift Camera: this produces images in which parallel vertical lines stay parallel, producing true two-point perspective. This is essential for 'taking in' the whole of an interior space without distortion, or for producing readable building elevations.

The Advanced Cameras also support Photoreal motion blur. Again, this is done in a single pass, rather than the multi-pass procedure used by the Classic camera, and is a real leap forward in quality. The same can be said of the new Depth of Field algorithm. The new advanced OpenGL support also means that these effects can now be viewed in the Layout viewports (if your graphics card is up to it.)

An interesting little feature has appeared on the Object Properties tab: Unseen by Radiosity. This enables you to take out of the Radiosity calculation any materials that don't add anything to the overall effect. Glass, for instance, contributes very little to Radiosity calculations, so removing it can both speed up your renders and change the light quality. LightWave doesn't support the Ambient Occlusion method of calculating diffuse light, which is often used as a much-faster (and less accurate) substitute for Radiosity, although there is an Occlusion shader node that can achieve much the same thing on a surface-by-surface basis.

A rewritten audio core with audio scrubbing capabilities is a major improvement to the application, allowing you to match animation to audio without resorting to third-party audio software.

The development that has grabbed most users' interest, though, is the fact that this is a universal binary, which means major speed increases on Intel-based Macs over the previous Rosetta-based version. In informal tests, we saw speed increases of two to three times over version 9.2 when rendering on a Mac Pro. There's no full 64-bit version (as with Windows), but given NewTek's commitment to the Mac, you can expect a full version to be released once Leopard is widely adopted.

At last, LightWave nine is up-to-speed on the Mac - and it's a free upgrade, too.