LightWave 3D 6.5

by NEWTEK INC.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 4.7 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000059GC3
• Item model number: LW040190-0651
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 10, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #26,468 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you are creative, you can build anything, June 27, 2001

By 

Robert E Wilson "robewil" (West Covina, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: LightWave 3D 6.5 (CD-ROM)

Lightwave 3D is one of the rare products that allows a novice user to create something amazing within an hour of using the program for the first time, and allow the user to dig deeper and deeper. Lightwave has a powerful foundation with a huge assortment of tools. One could literally use the program for a year and create amazing stuff, and yet, still not use half the features it offers. Virtually every tool is simple to implement, but powerful in their scope. The only catch is you need to be able to think and be able to solve problems. Lightwave does not hold your hand and build an Emmy Award winning animation for you. Lightwave is a giant 3D canvas just waiting for a talented person to fill it with something extraordinary.

Lightwave is supported by a community of dedicated animators who want to see the product continue to flourish. There are numerous books, tapes, and websites to aid the budding animator. You could spend a lot less than the price of Lightwave and get a lot less capability. You could also spend a lot more and I, for one, am not convinced you would get more.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lightwave 3D modeling and animation capabilities, August 18, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: LightWave 3D 6.5 (CD-ROM)

Lightwave is probably one of the most mature and capable of all the 3D modeling, rendering, and animation programs on the market. I have worked with it since it was first released in 1991 and was then unique to the Commodore Amiga platform; few know that it actually had a predecessor (also written by Allen Hastings) known as Videoscape.

The program is especially well suited to engineering and technical applications but it will handle essentially any kind of animation or modeling task extremely well. You can learn to use it quickly, but learning all of its capabilities is probably a life-long task.

These are some of the things I've used the program for:

1. Creating illustrations and cover art for technical documents. 2. Architectural renderings. 3. Training materials. 4. Scientific and technical visualization. 5. TV commercials

One interesting feature of the program is that it can import AutoCAD DFX files. Poser 3D - which models the human body - can export that format, so you with the combination of the two, yoou can create some striking images of the human form in any setting you can imagine.

It's a great program.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lightwave is amazing, June 26, 2001

By 

Chris M. "Chris" (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: LightWave 3D 6.5 (CD-ROM)

NewTek's lightwave 6.5 is a terrific program... in my opinion it is the easiest and fastest modeler around... the texture procedurals are just wonderfull. The program employs so many little features which go unnoticed but dramatically speed up creation time. Lightwave's interface is both easy to understand, and extremely efficient. Lightwave does not have little silly icons for each operation... rather they have words on buttons which are descriptors to what the button does... and on each button it tells you what the hotkey is to use that particular function. This naturally cuts the learning curve down very rapidly. Lightwave also has the simplest and fastest UV mapping functions i have ever seen. It is a WONDERFUL product and i recommend it anyone from the beginner 3d user to the seasoned expert