Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

23 July 2001

MWNY: Lightwave 6.5 rocks Macworld audiences

NewTek made a large impression at this year's MWNY expo, as their booth was largely packed the entire time. What made their booth particularly exciting was the array of different presentation materials and the perimeter demo stations featuring third-party and related products. Poser, for example, was shown at the NewTek booth by the Curious Labs folks.

Renderosity Shader Baking

Shader baking was shown to visitors of the NewTek booth. The technique is similar to renderosity but achieves even greater speed because the lighting is calculated only once. What then have is real-time, wicked fast rendering at renderosity levels. The short demo scene we saw looked astonishing.

LightWave Reel

One of the eye catching items in the NewTek booth was the reel of LightWave users out there doing incredible things with NewTek's software. One of the more amazing little films is called 405 the Movie. This gem of a short is incredibly entertaining in its suspense and clever use of special effects. To watch this film, which uses LightWave extensively, click here. Even Roger Ebert recommends it!

On the Environmental and Architecture Side

NewTek claims to have the best rendering engine in the business. And to be honest so do a lot of other software developers around. But one thing that NewTek emphasizes time again is their rendering speed. Built on a 160-bit floating point pipeline LightWave achieves quality and speeds often associated with much more expensive software and hardware. Forget high-end Unix, with LightWave and a Dual G4 Power Mac you can have super powerful rendering for much less.

When it comes to environments LightWave is convincing. Just check out their user galleries to get a sampling of the rendering ability of this program. There are a few good environmental and architectural samples as well.

To learn more about NewTek visit their Web site.