Happy Holiday 3D News from NewTek!

[jayroth]

Happy Holidays, everybody!

I would like to let you know that as of today's build, 1525, we are now at release candidate status. As you know, it has been a long road, but many positive things have occurred during this cycle. We started off to do a maintenance release only, but in the process, we have managed to add quite a few new features, and have really extended the functionality of LightWave. In particular, massive improvements to FiberFX, in terms of reliability and performance, as well as some new features have been made. Inverse Kinematics has seen dramatic improvements since 9.5, and those improvements in 9.5 were incredible when compared against previous versions.

The node editor has seen several new nodes, including the infamous car paint material, which begat the new flakes shader (my favorite!). Improvements to reflection speed, area light speed and quality, and anti-aliasing have been performed. GI has really seen a ton of work as well, with improvements to the animation cache, sampling and overall image quality.

In fact, so much has been improved in this version, including so many bugs sent to Valhalla, that we have realized that this is far more than just a bugfix release...

So, just in time for the holiday season, we welcome to the world LightWave v9.6.

You knew that was coming, didn't you?

In addition to all the stuff mentioned previously, LightWave v9.6 will bring the Mac and the PC versions back in sync. During the v9 series we have worked really hard to make this happen, and it has not been easy. You Mac users know what a difficult path it has been. You know that we have been performing a tremendous amount of work to allow FPrime to work in an optimal fashion with the UB version of LightWave -- as those who have been reading the SDK improvements can appreciate. As you read this, we are putting the finishing touches on the Mac as well, and we will be proud to say that this is the BEST version of LightWave for the Mac EVER.

Another notable advance, external rendering engines can now work as a LightWave task directly using the F9 and F10 commands, just like LightWave itself (updates are required from those products from their respective manufacturers, and of course, those products will need to conform to the v9.6 SDK.)

The v9 series has had a great run, and we have managed to pack an INCREDIBLE VALUE into the money you spent. Several major free releases occurred in the series, with hundreds of cool new features, and thousands of bugs killed. Any reasonable person would have to agree that no other 3D content creation product has EVER packed as much value and coolness for one low price as we here at NewTek have packed into LightWave. Personally, I am very proud of our development team – they came to the project under an untenable situation, and really stepped up. They performed above and beyond, and are some of the best engineers I have ever had the opportunity to work with in my career.

This dedicated group of people, from all over the world, has delivered to you what is arguably the single best version of LightWave ever. They have done so with major releases coming to you in less than 12 months at a time. The passion that this development team has for LightWave is equal to your own passion for LightWave.

We are getting to the point to where we are wrapping up the LightWave 9 series, and ready to move on to the next phase of LightWave’s journey. We'll talk more about that just after the first of the year. There are many surprises in store, and we can't wait to tell you about them.

Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and dedication to LightWave, and for your support of NewTek for all of these years.

All the best!

[dballesg]

Originally Posted by jayroth

In fact, so much has been improved in this version, including so many bugs sent to Valhalla, that we have realized that this is far more than just a bugfix release...

So, just in time for the holiday season, we welcome to the world LightWave v9.6.

You knew that was coming, didn't you?

Hi Jay,

You are kidding about 9.6 right?

I just catch this so let me be the first one to congratulate all the development team for your efforts and for the upcoming release!

And thanks for have so much patience with us the users!

Have a nice holidays and get a lot of rest, because after you come back we will start asking where is LW 10!!!

David

[cagey5]

Thanks for the update.

Good work guys. Have a good break and we'll see you all in the New Year.

[Bog]

Congratulations all. 9.5.1... pardon me, 9.6 is seriously exciting. It's advanced in leaps and bounds.

[Gregg "T.Rex"]

Great news, Jay...
We hadn't a .6 release since LihtWave 5.6...
9.6 sounds so ...techy after all...

Happy holidays to all NewTek people...

Cheers,
T.Rex

[arsad]

Happy holidays to all Newtek people!
Thank you very much for all the hard work.
Get a good rest. And eagerly waiting on news on LW X

[LMUSIC]

Congratulations to you and your whole team on some really excellent work!

Enjoy a well deserved break.

[Bog]

Break, hell - I wanna see tallies of full blood replacements from these buggers, they've earned it.

[Cageman]

Thanks NT! I'm truly a happy LW-user these days. I just wish that some of the future improvements would happen today.

What I wonder now is... are you saing that LW9.5.1 has transitioned into LW9.6 because of all the new stuff + bug fixes? Nothing against it at all, and, truth is... LW9.5.1 isn't just an incremental update...LW9.5.1 IS LW9.6 in my eyes....

[scratch33]

Thank you so much for this release.

Can't wait to know what is coming for the next step in lightwave story.

Happy holidays to all.

See you next year.

[jayroth]

Yes, 9.5.1 has had its name changed to 9.6 for the reasons I mentioned.

[Cageman]

Thanks for clarifying!

[joelaff]

Jay, nice to see what you, Granger, and the rest of the team have done with Lightwave. I loved EI, and now we have all the good parts of it in LW. Fantastic product!

[Chuck]

When you see the list of new features and enhancements (sans bug fixes) in one place, it really puts the cycle into perspective:

Bullet List Version:

LightWave v9.6 Feature Overview


Modeler

* Modeler in the Windows version now does drag and drop for files.


Layout

* Added drag-and-drop to the UI or the program icon for Layout Windows version, supports audio, lwo, lws, obj, images.
* Added drag-and-drop of image files to the Image Editor.
* Drag-and-drop extended to support .srf and image files dropped into the surface and texture image panes.
* Dynamic Range Limit enhanced to provide a range, with Minimum and Maximum values in the Image Processing window. Negative values also supported.
* Implemented "Exclude From Volume Stack" for surfaces.
* Added the new raytrace functions (see SDK section) into volumetrics and pixel filters.
* Added control script for setting the Radiosity Sample Diagnostics Flags.
* The Radiosity Flags (Render tab/Utilities/Radiosity Flags) are now stored in the scene file.
* Added ability to lock down Z buffer minimum and maximum range for export, for improved compositing compatibility:
o Minimum sets the 0 point in the buffer.
o Maximum sets the 1 point in the buffer.
* Added snapping to item position (specifically to pivot point) when dragging items in Layout.
* During Layout's bone re-parenting process, it now notifies plugins of the new bone item being added as well as the old bone item being removed.
* Package Scene has undergone a significant rewrite:
o New option "Preserve Existing Structure," will attempt to preserve all directories and subdirectories that are under the current Content directory when copying assets to the new content directory.
o New option "Reload Old Scene," reloads the original scene after exporting.
o Changed handling of Radiosity cache files, to work with the new Radiosity path behavior. Will also respect file structure if Preserve File Structure option is selected.
o Added an option for Radiosity cache files to be included in the package or not.
* Added an option to draw wireframe handles and gizmos using antialiased lines. This improves the look of bones quite a bit. The "Handle Wire Smoothing" setting is in the Handles&Icons tab of the Display preferences panel. 0 (default) is off, larger values make the lines thicker (7 seems to work well). If set, this value also controls the line thickness of the grid, if grid antialiasing is enabled.
* Made Parent In Place more aware of scaling sign.
* Two new Lscripts for working creating or assigning handles have been added: Create Handle, Assign Handle.
* Enhanced Viper performance for all modes on all platforms.
* Added new Mirror Hierarchy generic LScript.
* Added Foot Printer LScript for automatically adding footprints to a character scene.


Layout and Modeler

* Added Windows 32-bit with SSE2 optimizations as new platform.


Enhanced Integration Capabilities

Collada and FBX I/O

* Rotation and scale animation export have been added to Collada.
* Controls for scaling have been added to FBX import and export.
* Implemented converting the filename to utf8 for the FBX library to save non-ASCII filenames.
* FBX: now exporting Bezier interpolated Animation curves.
* FBX:
o Converting TCB->Hermite->Bezier on export.
o Importing FBX animation curves as Bezier.
* FBX: now using the last UV mapped texture layer for color UV map export.


OBJ I/O Plugin:

* Allow the user to determine if the new OBJ exporter will or will not merge points in export with a new option, OBJ Merge Points.
* OBJ I/O: Added ZBrush Mode to for fully compatible import and export with ZBrush. The importer will read in the object with Zbrush selection sets (groups) intact.



Node Editor Enhancements

* New material node, Carpaint.
* New procedural based off the carpaint material, "Flakes".
* New node, Curve, for editing gradients using curves. Curve Node Enhancements:
o Added a toggle to turn on "key creation mode" for the Curve node.
o Made the viewport in the Curve node pan with ALT+LMB.
o Added a toggle button to turn on "stretch mode". The stretch mode works as follows: Left button stretches the values(Y), and holding down CTRL stretches the positions(X).
o Changed the coloring of the grid area in the Curve node to separate the workspace from the position/value scales.
o Added Copy, Cut and Paste functionality to the Curve node.
o Added undo/redo functionality to the Curve node.
o Selecting keys with shift held down will add keys to the selection, and holding ctrl will remove keys from selection.
o Clicking on the gradient at the bottom of the graph will popup a color requester and add a key with the selected color.
o Changed the control point handle lines to stippled lines.
o Made different curve types conform to each other when lock control point is on.
o Made the the opposite side control point highlight when lock control points is on.
* Improved the accuracy of the cubic bezier used in the Curve node.
* Added a "Partial Internal Reflections" toggle checkbox for Dielectric. Toggle this on for full accuracy with internal reflections, or off to allow for faster rendering when full-on accuracy is not required.
* Added the new raytrace functions (see SDK section) into materials and shaders.
* Implemented buffer writing for all materials and all shading models.
* Made the shadow buffer work with most material nodes.
* Updated Nodes use the new smarter "AA" aware sampling developed for the Renderer.


IK and Animation Systems

* Compensation and flexing for joint bones now takes into account any bending, not just pitch angle.
* Added bone bulging, which causes a radial distortion based on bone stretching and bending (for parent bulging only bending).
* Made bone bulging textureable.
* Added a general bone deformation displacement texture. The input parameters for texture gradients include:
o Bend: angle between bone and parent bone.
o Bulge Falloff: bulging falloff along bone (0 at ends, 1 in the middle).
o Bulge: radial bulging factor away from bone.
o Distance
o Angle from Inside: angle of point along bone radial, with 0 being the direction facing the parent bone.
* Added ability for bones to be reparented to different objects. This allows inserting nulls in a bone hierarchy.
* The default name for joints is now "Joint" instead of "Bone".
* Tweaked the picking of joints to make it easier to pick them instead of the bones between them.
* When the bone part of a joint bone is selected, the axes are now effectively locked.
* Added option to use double-clicking to enter and exit bone selection mode. The option is in the General Preferences tab ("Dbl. Click Bone Mode"). When on, a double-click is needed to select a bone when not in bone mode. And when in bone mode, a double-click is needed to select a non-bone. The default is off.
* The IK solver has undergone another major rewrite for much greater stability and improved handling of legacy scenes.
o Maestro-generated rigs now appear to work properly again.
o Made significant changes to Go To Goal, to make it less jittery.
o Better behaviour near full extension
o Added a check for very slow error reduction, which allows the solver to stop sooner
o Changed the way controller stiffness, goal strength, and controller limits influence the solver.
o Changed "Go To Goal" IK to a hybrid second order method, which solves an issue with the chain going nuts when the goal is moved far away.
o Some optimization if the second order derivative of the motion matrix is known to be zero.
o Slightly changed the way stiffness is applied. This helps a bit to get closer to the goal near full extension.
* The deformation settings for a bone are now hidden if the joint part of a joint bone is selected, with the exception of zero-length joints.


Lighting System

* Improved the sampling for the photometric, spherical and dome lights, which greatly improves quality.
* Spherical light now has a default size of 100mm rather than 0.


FiberFX

* Added support for multiple FiberFX instances on a single mesh. Cloned FiberFX instances have a "(#)" appended to the object name in list. Deactivating a cloned instance removes the entry from the list.
* Added stereo rendering ability to FiberFX.
* Enabled multi-threaded depth buffer raycast to allow the pixel filter to operate with the raytraced cameras, including features such as Depth of Field and Photoreal Motion Blur.
* FiberFX has been enhanced to work with all subd orders. This allows using imported mdd files.
* Added occlusion culling of fibers. Speedup depends on how many fibers are behind in the z buffer.
* Added right mouse button menu popup with clone command.
* Reworked mouse deltas for better combing. Comb direction is now independent of starting point.
* Changed clamping of color values to support HDRI. Added dynamic range limits and clamping to LW interface values from the image processing panel.
* Added FFx object list popup menu item (Save To Default) to save the current ffsurface as the default to be used the next time a new instance is created. This will allow the user to customize their default settings. Added support functions to save default to user setting folder.
* FiberFX now disallows subd changes after editing guides. and enforces the same subd level for preview and rendering, to insure stability of the guide edits. A warning message will be displayed when the preview and render subd levels are different, informing user that these settings need to be matched when using FiberFX.
* Optimizations have been made to the FiberFX IK solver.
* Revised the way modeled strand fibers are built. Previously they were clones, now they are shortened on the inside of the curve and lengthened on the outside of the curve, following the modeled strand in a more natural way. See image attached below.
* Guide edit panel now resets its control state when switching between editing objects.
* Added "Random" toggle button for Swirl to make a random starting rotation offset, plus load and save code.


Cameras

* The Classic Camera now uses double precision math like the new cameras. This allows the camera and objects to render correctly even if they are far away from the origin.


Renderer

Radiosity Improvements:

* Optimizations to improve the speed and quality of radiosity rendering.
* Speeded up rendering of animations when animated radiosity cache is enabled.
* Optimization to speed up the radiosity sample searches.
* Optimization to speed up radiosity preprocessing when the Multiplier is more than 100%.
* Reduced the noise for area lights and non-interpolated radiosity when used in conjunction with anti-aliasing.
* Added manual control for the radiosity gradients.
* Added manual control for the behind test.


General Rendering Changes

* Improved the Oversample option for the new camera modes for better antialiasing.
* The oversample can now be animated via its envelope.
* Added Ray Cutoff to the raytracer, to improve detection and early termination of rays that will not affect shading, which provides speed improvements in some situations.
* Implemented the Ray Cutoff feature for the hard-coded shading model.
* Limit dynamic range is now applied to the shaded buffers. Examples are the reflection, diffuse, specular and backdrop buffers.
* Added new functionality to the access structures to read and write to render buffers from shaders, nodes and volumetric plugins.
* The Z buffer value for the camera ray is now available to pixel filters that are rendered multi-threaded.
* Multi-threaded pixel filters are now called as if they were single-threaded from the Classic Camera.
* Changed the Z Buffer maximum sent to the multi-threaded pixel filters to 2.0E14f, which matches the Classic Camera.
* Added the multi-threaded flag to Skytracer for raytraced camera support.
* Added cloning of non-multithreaded pixel filters per render thread when pixel filter multi-threading is forced on. This allows multi-threaded rendering when using such pixel filters.
* The render buffers are now averaged when requested by a pixel filter plug-in in the ray traced camera modes. This is consistent with the way the buffers are treated for image filter plug-ins.
* Pixel filters can now set the z buffer depth and alpha when the primary ray does not hit any polygons.
* Implemented the smarter sampling for soft reflections and refractions.


Mac/Universal Binaries

* Completed the Mosaic mode for the Mac.
* Added a Dock menu to the Hub that adds the ability to launch applications, like the Hub Taskbar menu does in Windows.
* Added Dock Tile Render Status to the Mac UB version. This updates the dock icon with a progress bar during rendering a frame or scene.
* Added Command+R and Command+Shift+R shortcuts for Render Frame and Render Scene. Newer MacBooks already have up to three different default behaviors for F9, which may make it difficult for users to render with that shortcut out of the box on a new Mac. This allows them to use a more Mac-like shortcut if they want, without disabling that feature for those users who prefer F9.
* UB: dialog style windows will bounce dock icon when when the front process so as to alert user a request is waiting.
* UB: Made change on quit window a dialog instead of a palette window so it can bounce dock icon when not in front.
* UB: Text fields show all selected when focused and previously not focused. It becomes easier this way to replace existing numeric values by single clicking in field and type new value.
* UB: Added partial support for SECURE property for a text field, which is supposed to allow for password-style entry.

[jayroth]

Originally Posted by joelaff

Jay, nice to see what you, Granger, and the rest of the team have done with Lightwave. I loved EI, and now we have all the good parts of it in LW. Fantastic product!

Thanks, Joe.

Editor note: The list of changes is too long to fit into a single post, so part II appended to Jay's comment. -Paul


SDK/Scripting


Renderer

* Changed the illuminate functions added in v9.5 to implement improvement to raytracing speed, roughly 30% to 40% reduction in rendering time for affected situations.
* Added all the radiosity settings the Scene Object Agent so that they are now available to third party plugins and renderers.
* Added the Layout RadiosityFlags() command. This command is used to set one or more radiosity flag values.
* Added 8 Radiosity user debugging display flags to the SDK.
* Added 8 environment constants for use with the RadiosityFlags() command.
* Exposed the LightWave render mode in the scene info structure.
* Changed the new raytrace data function to accept an opaque pointer to renderer specific data.
* Add min and max dynamic range to scene info structure.
* Add saturation to scene info structure.
* Added which stereo eye camera is currently being evaluated to SDK, and a supporting SDK flag.
* Added a new flag to the SDK in the sceneinfo which will force all pixel filters to render multi-threaded in the ray trace cameras.
* Added as_multithreaded_filters to LWSceneInfo structure. This is a flag added to test if all active pixel filters are capable of being multitasked.
* Separated out filter buffer flags from filter buffer types.
* Added pre-multiplied alpha flag to the scene info render options.


External Renderer

* Implemented capability in SDK for an External Renderer.
* Updated Layout UI to respond to an external renderer. New External Render Tab shows choice of renderers, F9, F10, F11 commands will engage for external renderer.
* Enhanced the Image Viewer to display renders from an external renderer.
* 35 Layout commands have been activated in ScreamerNet to assist with network rendering with an external renderer.
* An LWSDK header and a sample plug-in for implementing an external renderer are now included in the SDK.


Volumetrics and Improved Thread-Safe Interaction with FPrime
(Thread -Safe Interaction affects all platforms, but is most critical for resolving UB/FPrime issues)

* Added new defines in ComRing for LIMBO_STATE notifications, for use in volumetrics plugins for safe access for interactive preview applications.
* Added LIMBO_STATE notifications to HyperVoxels to improve safe access for interactive preview applications.
* To provide stability when Viper and FPrime are both active, the HyperVoxels subsystem has been changed to protect access when HyperVoxel preview functions are engaged and until they conclude, preventing both from polling HyperVoxels at the same time. Please note that it is still recommended not to use Viper if FPrime is in use.
* ViperAbort() public routine added which triggers a VIPER preview to quit early and finish up its sequence stepper (cleanup).
* System now detects and handles Viper initialization and cleanups that occur without the expected predecessor event.
* Added motion update notification around a camera evaluation lock during a motion calculation.
* Volumetric Changes:
o Function prototype now C++ instead of C.
o When value changes, start limbo state after stopping current preview render.
o Remove dependency on layout header for MAXTHREADS constant. Since the Volumetric render startup routine receives the number of threads to use, a function called VRenderMaxThreads() is used to retrieve this.
o Volumetric init/cleanup is nesting counted so that they only occur at the root nesting level. This requires clients of volumetric routines to ensure the nesting is balanced.
o Volumetric light preview ray is a structure member, which could in future allow for rendering multiple such lights simultaneously. (Note that this is not the same as multiple threads to render a single volumetric light). Previewing uses current time info instead of time 0, which might occur sometimes.


Character Animation

* Working on distinguishing selection of the joint part of a jointbone from the bone part:
o Gizmos can now associate a part numbers with gizmo drawing.
o Part numbers of the selected items are now passes to the gizmo pickItems function.
o Interface info global function itemColorRgba() has changed to include a state input, so that the item color of an item in selected and unselected state can be obtained.
* New commands to help with writing bone tool scripts:
o Added a DirtyMotion command to mark item's motion as dirty.
o ParentInPlace now takes an optional argument to set the state to an explicit value, instead of toggling.
o ClearSelected now takes an optional argument to supress the confirmation dialog.
* Added "EnableMC" command to complement "EnableIK". It turns off/on motion controllers (targeting, align to path, pole vector, same as item, but not IK).


General

* Added tag for CTL_MOUSEBUTTON,
* Added mBut enumeration for mouse buttons.
* Added support in SDK for which mouse button was pressed in a control to support contextual menus.
* A new 1-based data member called 'polIndex' is now available, congruent with LScript's 1-based indexing idiom.
* Implemented obtaining of item flags in LScript, corresponding with iteminfo->flags() in the LWSDK.