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!