A full list of features in the new version can be found at www.newtek.com and it’s a long list. Note that some features claimed as ‘new’ are present in 5.0. Some of the additions seem superficial, like the interface re-design, others are more exciting– the addition of volume rendering and particle effects for example. But more important than a huge list of new features is how well they work. I’ve been using LW 5.5 Intel in a professional environment for several months now, so I’ve got a fair handle on how well all the new features work in practice. And it’s a mixed bag. The most obvious change when you start the program is the new interface (Figure 1). LW’s interface was starting to look a little dated and felt clumsy, in hindsight. Using V5.0 now makes that obvious!

Looking at LW’s excellent modelling module, cleverly called "Modeler", there are some excellent improvements. At an interface level, the addition of user-definable keyboard shortcuts is long overdue, but very welcome. Strangely and sadly, Layout doesn’t share this feature. Many of the object modification tools like bend and taper can now have their parameters set interactively with the mouse, rather than having to type in numeric values in control panels. The new Dragnet tool acts like a quick-and-dirty combination of drag and magnet. The knife tool allows you to add geometry to your object by drawing a line where you want the ‘cut’, which is very useful for metanurbs objects. Metanurbs objects, which are four-point-polygon objects LW uses as a spline cage, can now be built using three-point polygons, though sticking to four-point polygons seems to still give the best results.

Text modelling is also much improved, with the Text Compose plug-in allowing the creation of multiple lines of justified text, albeit with the odd bug lurking. And you can now type directly onto the modeler screen. I would highly recommend the use of a structured drawing program like Adobe Illustrator, both for laying out larger amounts of text and for general drawing type modelling tasks. The new Illustrator plug-in will import these files beautifully, and a program like Adobe Illustrator gives you much better control for creation and editing of spline-based text and logos.

Layout, Lightwaves’ animation module, has been significantly upgraded. The new interface is a big improvement, with many little touches to improve workflow– it’s not just cosmetic. Windows are now modeless – you don’t need to close them to see changes reflected in the Layout window, or to work in the Layout window. You will need a large screen and high screen resolution to get good use from this feature, though. Most panels are quite large. Play with Dynamic Update, which allows you to watch an object move as you tweak it’s motion envelope, or a texture move in OpenGL as you adjust it’s size in the Surfacing panel, and you start to get a feel for the new power LW offers. These features work well – but you’ll need a fairly pokey machine to get good feedback. And, yes, I did just mention OpenGL texturing. This only displays brushmaps, not algorithmic textures, but even so it’s immensely useful. The Layout display is looking closer to the finished render all the time. (Figure 2)

Object surfacing has improved in several ways. Brushes can now be assigned to a reference null, which can be used to position a brush on a surface at any angle and size, interactively if you use OpenGL. No longer are you restricted to front, side or top projection, with no rotation. The use of a reference null makes it a doddle to animate brush position, rotation and size – great for animating eyes. Sadly, surfacing is still somewhat weak in several areas. There is no provision for UV mapping, changing the order of layered textures is difficult (read practically impossible), and surface attributes still can’t have their values keyframed over time. These are major shortcomings, which users have been screaming for years, and it’s disappointing to see them still in the software. It would also be nice to see some more algorithmic textures. Eight isn’t enough (okay, it’s ten, but you get the picture).

Layout now features some transport (VCR-like) controls along the bottom of the window. (Figure 1). Turn on Auto Keyframe, press play on the transport controls, and move your object, and the movement will be recorded. This feature is mostly useful for blocking out animation roughly, and does leave a key on every frame, so it’s of limited value, but occasionally comes in handy. Being able to just hit play and watch your animation isn’t quite as useful as it sounds - depending on how complex the scene is, and how good your hardware is, you may not get a great playback rate.

The new bone and IK functions are welcome. Since 5.0, bones can be set to cause muscle flexing, which works well in most cases – check a gadget, and your character has biceps! Joints can be set to bend more realistically, too. IK speed is vastly improved in 5.5, making it a very useful tool, with nice fast feedback. New tools in Layout for creating skeletons of bones make set-up quicker, but I’ve found the new Skeleton Maker plug-in in Modeller to be the more useful tool. It allows you to "draw" a skeleton with your character in the background layer, the plug-in then creates a scene file with the character and it’s skeleton all ready to go. This work very well, though branching chains give it a few problems, but the workarounds aren’t difficult. Parenting bones to other objects still causes headaches, which really require the purchase of a third-party plug-in to solve. In a package of LW’s sophistication, anything should be parentable or targetable to anything else. This is not the case, unfortunately.

Two of the bigger additions to Layout are Steamer and Skytracer. Steamer is a volumetric rendering engine, for creating smoke, clouds, steam, solid light beams and the like. Skytracer creates beautiful skyscapes as backdrops for your renders, with animated clouds and sunsets. Unfortunately both plugins are still beta software, and are a bit crash prone, Skytracer especially. Development is continuing, and one patch for Steamer has already been released. Particle Storm Lite has also been added to LW, allowing some sophisticated particle effects, and it works hand-in-hand with Steamer to create great comet trails, fire, steam and many other effects, at the expected cost of rendering time. Some excellent tutorials and amazing sample animation’s come with Steamer, and it’s almost worth the price of the upgrade alone. If you aren’t convinced, take a look at the screen-shots at the NewTek link mentioned above.

Another great addition is the long-awaited Morph Gizmo. This allows you to create a series of morph targets (facial expressions, for example), load them into Morph Gizmo, then mix and match smiles, blinks, frowns etc. and keyframe them over time. An OpenGL preview window shows your results, and the animation can be played back to check timing. You then save a data file, and in Layout apply the Morph Gizmo plug-in and specify the data file. You only need to load the base object into Layout – the plugin displaces points to match your original morph targets. This is a wonderful plug-in for character animators, and will find a lot of use with many animators. (Figure 3)

The new area lights for soft, raytraced shadows, work well but are very slow. It would be nice to be able to tweak the number of lights in the array. The claimed ability to load multiple objects works in Modeler, but not Layout. Loading wave files for animating to is still experimental – hit ctrl-shift-F1 to activate this in the Scene Editor panel, or type the letters w-a-v-e in Morph Gizmo. A very useful feature, hopefully NewTek will be able to smooth out audio playback. Accurate preview playback rates would also be nice. The Cel Shader, which turns your 3D renders into 2D cell animation-like imagery has been upgraded, and is now much more useful and flexible.

A macro language, Lscript (previously available separately as BML) has been added to Layout and Modeler, allowing the user to write custom scripts to perform complex or repetitive actions. For programming types, this can be very useful, although you don’t have control of all elements of the software, so it’s not quite as useful as it could be, but it’s a great tool.

On the rendering front, LW is now multithreaded, so those with multiprocessor machines will be happy. However, there is presently a bug which causes artefacts in the render when using transparency and multithreading. Smaller scenes may also take longer when using multithreading, so a little experimenting is required. Screamernet, LW’s distributed rendering software, is also multithreaded. Unfortunately the number of threads is stored in the LW configuration file, not the individual scene files, so you need to keep a close eye on your thread setting if you want different numbers of threads for different scenes. Many rendering functions have now been placed in one new panel, for easy editing and checking of file types, frame ranges, render mode and so forth. Also added is a render mode called RenderGL, which is a new rendering technology from Intergraph that uses OpenGL hardware to accelerate rendering. I’ve had mixed results on my LeadTek L2300 accelerator, but then RenderGL needs to be properly licensed to work with a particular card, and only a few cards, mostly from Intergraph, are officially approved for use with it. It can render a complex frame in seconds, with some limitations, and for preview renders it can be very useful.

Many companies would have been tempted to call Lightwave 5.5 version 6.0, but NewTek apparently have bigger plans for version 6. Rumours abound about a complete rewrite, but whatever form it takes, to stay competitive NewTek will need to add features such as UV mapping, independent motion channels with better spline control than the current TSB method, a better method of managing and editing lists of objects, surfaces, bones, lights and duplicating and creating them, expressions for automating and driving object motion from other objects, animateable textures, and a few other features users have longed for, but LW’s current architecture has made difficult. For a flying logo creator, LW has come a long way, but it’s history is starting to show. That said, LW 5.5 is a great improvement, and is well worth the upgrade price. Steamer or Gizmo are worth the upgrade price by themselves. If you are a new user, Lightwave offers a relatively gentle, logical learning curve – I completed my first paying work with it only a day after opening the box. Lightwaves’ intuitive lighting and camera controls, production oriented work methods, and excellent render quality have endeared it to major studios and smaller producers alike.
Highly recommended.

Bill Boyce - Animation - 3D, 2D even 1D ( a line in your choice of colour )