Hi everybody,
There's been a lot of interest and discussion following our recent LightWave CORE announcement. Many of you are very excited about LightWave CORE, but you'd like more information; more details. So, let's dive a bit deeper into LightWave CORE.
Our goal since beginning this direction over two years ago was to create a path of evolution that does not make you, our loyal customers, feel abandoned by facing a completely foreign workflow and UI (as has been the case for some other 3D apps in the past), yet through our LightWave CORE roadmap providing you with the best next-generation technology any current 3D app can provide.
From this point on, new purchases, upgrades and HardCORE memberships will be receiving LightWave CORE, which incorporates the new framework, engine and features. LightWave will be forever improving and you are a part of a significant moment in time, a time that can be looked back to one day and be recognized as the milestone when LightWave began its new path of evolution.
LightWave CORE is the new technology engine that will eventually completely supplant the current engine. Your mesh assets, image maps and some surfacing attributes will be accessible to LightWave CORE, but plug ins will not be. We will work with third parties to help guide them as they port their products over to LightWave CORE.
For now, our primary focus for LightWave CORE will be in the modeling environment. We have had so many ideas for modeling in the past, but we really needed the CORE architecture to take it to a whole new level. Of course, CORE is capable of anything, but we did need to start somewhere -- modeling was a good choice, and modeling will be the primary focus for the LightWave CORE release later this year. We will discuss specifics as we move along with the project.
So what happens to the LightWave 9 series?
As you know, we recently shipped LightWave 9.6, and you've told us that it's, hands-down, the very best version of LightWave we've ever-shipped. Of course, no software product is ever perfect, so we will continue to support LightWave 9.x by providing technical support, and free bug-fix releases as deemed necessary by NewTek. However, we do not plan any new feature releases in the 9.x series. All the improvements that we have planned for LightWave will be offered as part of the HardCORE membership program.
We have a strong vision for what will make LightWave CORE the best 3D app on the planet, but we cannot do this without you: we plan to use the feedback we get from our HardCORE members and from our key account users to deliver that.
Many of you have already made the leap and joined our HardCORE program. Thank you very much for doing that. We truly appreciated the important contribution that many of you made in the 9.x Open Beta program, and we are looking forward to getting your input for LightWave CORE.
Some of you are still considering whether you should join the HardCORE program or not. I truly hope you will. Not only will you get early access to LightWave CORE technology, but you'll get to play a role in shaping our next generation 3D application.
Now, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the HardCORE program is probably not for everyone. If you need to know in advance every detail of every feature we're going to deliver before you make your decision, then you should most definitely wait until we ship the first LightWave CORE version and we publish a final feature list.
On to the screens:
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This screen illustrates a sample of instancing in CORE. Instancing is handled via the CORE scene graph. Instances are created via the “Clone” command. In this illustration, We can see the source object is also sub divided to 17 levels, for a total of 8,102,115 polygons (quads and tris.) There are seven total objects, one master and six clones, for a scene total of 56,714,805 polygons. Playback speed in this case is dictated by system resources and graphics card memory. In this example, the card is an Nvidia Quadro FX1600M, with 512MB RAM, 256 Dedicated, running on a Dell Precision M6300 Laptop with 2GB of RAM, and WinXP SP3.
Credits: Dragon Mesh by Lino Grandi and Alessandro Di Fulvio
Note: the user interface as presented is an engineering skin, and should not be considered final.
This screen illustrates the use of the GPU and GPU memory for handling subdivision surfaces. This example shows that the mesh is subdivided to 30 levels, for a total of 25,231,500 polygons. At this level, the user still has very good tool and view performance, as the GPU is doing most of the work. In this example, the card is an Nvidia Quadro FX1600M, with 512MB RAM, 256 Dedicated, running on a Dell Precision M6300 Laptop with 2GB of RAM, and WinXP SP3.
Credits: Dragon Mesh by Lino Grandi and Alessandro Di Fulvio
Note: the user interface as presented is an engineering skin, and should not be considered final.
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Stay tuned. We'll have some more LightWave CORE details, screen shots, videos, etc. to show you in the coming weeks.
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