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Architosh reminds you to take a look at LightWave 6.0!

3 May 00

An Architosh reader (Seb) wrote in to remind us that LightWave 6.0 was missing from our list of CAD and 3D programs. We have commented on this program before, most notably at the 1999 Seybold show in Boston. We will, of course, be adding it to the list of growing 3D and CAD programs for the Macintosh. Yes! the list of programs for Macintosh is growing, believe it or not. In fact, we are going on a special field-trip today to a location in the heart of Cambridge's Harvard Square to visit some programmers working on an entirely new, full featured architectural CADD application. But that's another story.

LightWave 6.0 - AltiVec enabled 3D power!

LightWave 6 has some groundbreaking technologies for a 3D modeler/renderer with full animation capabilities. New features in version 6 include radiosity with caustics, rendering for the calculation of indirect light as it bounces from diffuse, reflective and refractive surfaces, which allow LightWave to render the nuances of lighting better than any other package on the market. Specific features are:

  • 160-bit IEEE 'floating-point' rendering pipeline -- sure to scream on a G4
  • HDRI allows scenes to be illuminated entirely from original photographs
  • sub-pixel displacement rendering for the creation of volumetric surfaces such as water
  • HyperVoxels for direct ray tracing of volummetrics - 400% faster HyperVoxel rendering
  • Soft Body Dynamics engine
  • 300% speed boost for volumentric lighting with full texture support.
  • VIPER (Versatile Interactive Preview Renderer)

LightWave 6 is becoming an industry standard in Hollywood special effects studios and Game Development is moving to the program as well. LightWave 6 is fully cross-platform between Windows NT and Power Macintosh. You can move data between systems easily and the UI's are identical, respective of platform GUI nuances.

The Macintosh and LightWave 6: NAB

LighWave 6 for Macintosh is the best and most significant release for the platform ever, according to NewTek. LightWave 6 uses OpenGL extensively and they have worked directly with Apple's OpenGL team to enable real-time reflection mapping,lens flares, ZBuffer fog and other visualization helpers. In addition, LightWave 6 is fully Carbon compliant for OS X and takes advantage of the AltiVec instruction set in G4 processor-based machines. To read more about how LightWave 6 for Macintosh at NAB click here.

 

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