LightWave v9.5 Update Includes:

Character Animation Enhancements

New Hair and Fur System
Enhanced IK and Animation Systems
• New Collada, FBX and OBJ I/O
• New IK Calculation Options for Faster Performance
• New Bone Type - Joints
• New Objective Options for IK
• IK/FK blending
• Multi-threaded Mesh Deformation Evaluation

Modeler
• UV Unwrap/UV Relax
• Symmetry Tolerance

Lighting, Rendering and Surfacing Enhancements

All New Lighting System
• New Light API
• IES Lights
• New Spherical Light
• Area and Linear Lights Enhanced
• Faster Sampling System for GI
• Improved GI
• New GI Controls to Customize the Render
• Disk-Based GI Cache

Node Editor Enhancements
• Interpolated Soft Rlections/Refractions
• Support for new Light API Functions
• Oren-Nayar Shading Option for Many Materials
• Optimizations for Materials and Shaders

SDK and LScript Improvements
• New Light Plug-in Class for third Party Lights and Light Plug-ins
• SDK Support for New GI Functions and Disk Cache
• SDK Support for New IK and Animation Capabilities
• Set surface properties through the Surface Global

UI and Workflow Enhancements
• Enhanced Scene Limits
• Updated Scene File Format
• EXIF Metadata Support
• OpenGL GLSL Enhanced for New Lighting System
• Image Viewer Consolidation

LightWave v9 marks a rebirth; core changes provide a tremendous increase in user interface performance, dynamics systems improvements and render speed enhancements. LightWave v9 adds a broad range of new features and improved workflows for faster and more efficient production at all levels. LightWave has been production proven time and time again in films, television, games, print, engineering, architecture and more.

LightWave® v9 is the perfect combination of power, speed and value. Long considered one of the easiest 3D animation systems to learn and use, LightWave 3D® is versatile enough for any application from award-winning visual effects to stunning hi-res print graphics, dynamic video games, powerful motion graphics and more. LightWave offers modeling, animation, dynamics, volumetric rendering, particle effects and a motion picture quality rendering engine with unlimited render nodes making LightWave the centerpiece of the most cost effective 3D production pipelines in the world.

General Controls:
• Support fractional frames at make key for IK Booster
• Update Bake-able Match Goal Orientation for IK Booster
• Tool for moving an object on or by an offset distance across the surface of a target mesh.
• A new rotation controller offers quaternion rotations to minimize gimbal lock.
• Tool which modifies a channel based on closest distance between an object and a mesh or other items.
• LightWave's Align to Path command now offers a robust new align-to-path algorithm, unaffected by very slow or no motion. The original Align to Path is still available, and is now renamed to more accurately describe its function, "Align to Velocity."
• Squash and stretch tool
• Motify: Replacement Delete key option. It includes more advanced features, including clearing motions, deleting ranges of keys and deleting keys within a threshold
• Hybrid Inverse/Forward Kinematics engine improving on the industry's most flexible IK system available today
• Free-form and locked IK goals
• Separate animated channels
• Animatable UV coordinates

LightWave 3D is a complete solution right out of the box that includes three different operating systems to meet your particular production requirements: Windows® 32-bit, Windows 64-bit and Macintosh®. LightWave for each operating system comes with unlimited render nodes. LightWave also supports the latest generation of dual-core and multi-core processor systems at no additional cost.

LightWave v9 introduces new interface paradigms, such as a Node Editor for materials and surfaces, volumetric lights, and displacements. Exciting new physically correct cameras have been added, allowing artists to recreate any real world camera lens, and have footage rendered in LightWave match real world photography (a must for compositing CGI and real footage together). These cameras can also be extended into the hyper-real, or even bizarre, as any mesh object can itself be made into a camera and record a scene. The possibilities are limitless.

New techniques for displacement mapping, and support for ZBrush® displacements have been added. New shading models, such as Blinn, Oren- Nayar, and Ambient Occlusion now allow for a tremendous versatility for artists no longer bound by the original shading model in previous versions of LightWave. Of particular note are the new shaders for sub-surface scattering, anisotropic specular and refl ection shaders (which allow for hromatic aberration), easy to use and offering a spectacular visual impact. Artists and technicians have more power to access, with the inclusion of the popular Relativity 2 expression system in LightWave v9. This system uses easy “expression wizards” to create associations between almost any scene component or animation channel, and has been used for some incredibly complex effects that were a snap to set up. All these changes and more make LightWave v9 the best solution for all 3D artwork needs. Whether you are modeling or animating, working in fi lm and broadcast or for print, dealing with organic or inorganic objects - LightWave 3D is the tool for the job.