LightWave 7.0 on OS X

NewTek's LightWave has bridged the prosumer and professional 3D-animation market since the mid-90s. It is the first moderately priced 3D application to become accepted as an alternative to Softimage and Alias|Wavefront's Maya in numerous major Hollywood effects studios. Today, this has forced these high-end applications to restructure their pricing.

While Max has market share in the game industry and the backing of Autodesk and Discreet, LightWave has won the Hollywood battle with a string of successful episodic TV programs including SeaQuest, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, Xena, and Hercules as well as numerous feature films including Titanic. This helped LightWave build a large professional user base and beachheads at Digital Domain and other large effects studios.

LightWave 7.0 continues an aggressive upgrade schedule by concentrating on workflow enhancements and the latest rendering technologies. Millimeter looked at Version 7 for the Mac and opens up this review with basic advice: Use OS X. This was also NewTek's frank recommendation because LightWave is unstable on any older Classic Mac system. We tested LightWave 7.0 on OS X and found the combination to be absolutely production-worthy.

One of the most important new features in Version 7.0 is the Spreadsheet Editor. It's hard to imagine working with complex scenes without this powerful tool. It's not unusual for scenes to include multiple characters, moving objects, dozens of lights, and other dynamic props, all of which may have interdependencies and hundreds of key frames. Even a small change in the action can mean updating dozens and possibly hundreds of other variables. This also means accessing all the associated palettes, windows, and text fields to make the changes.

The Spreadsheet Editor allows the artist to view the entire scene in a simplified view and make changes to individual items as members of a group or class, such as a series of street lamps seen in an aerial view of a CGI city. Rather than type new lighting values into the text field of each light, the Spreadsheet Editor allows you to apply the new value to all the street lamps in a single simple update. This type of global change overlaps with some of the advantages of scripting but in a much more direct fashion. The Spreadsheet Editor can be organized and filtered in a variety of ways so that you can cull unnecessary detail and only view what is of interest.

For a few years now, the idea of reusing animation in a cut-and-paste style with intelligent blending has been called non-linear animation. LightWave offers their version of this in the Motion Mixer. It's actually a hybrid of a cel-animation exposure sheet and the timeline manipulation of sequences used by compositors and editors. The Motion Mixer works with individual animation segments that are connected end-to-end, for example, a character that sits, then stands, then walks. In the timeline, each of these three action segments can be copied and pasted, scaled up or down in time, and blended seamlessly. This is a very powerful way to create crowd and secondary character actions, but less so for lead characters where maximum control and specific personality is required.

The LightWave renderer has always been one of the selling points of the product. To keep up with several of the latest trends of the last two years, LW incorporated some of the latest technologies. High Dynamic Range Images (HDRIs) is a proprietary format that contains the equivalent of up to 15 bracketed exposures of a photographed scene in a single file. This extended lighting information is then projected onto objects in LightWave serving as a 360-degree light source and properly containing the “bounced” light from the surrounding environment (the real location that was photographed). The result is a high degree of correspondence between the lighting in the live scene and the CGI element being inserted. LightWave is one of the first applications to offer this feature, and the results are a significant advance over user-estimated lighting solutions.

Digital Confusion tackles the problem of Depth of Field by providing a complete set of parameters for achieving this specialized optical phenomenon. It is, like all other Depth of Field solutions, a 2D cheat. While the underlying math is correctly based on geometric optics, the actual effect is just a graduated 2D blur. While Digital Confusion (named for the Circle of Confusion that is responsible for optical Depth of Field) provides control over subtle aspects of DOF such as the iris shape, there are several 2D plug-in convolution filters that are available for products like After Effects and Combustion that achieve similar results. Digital Confusion, however, is invaluable when camera motion is involved and automatically adjusts DOF to the camera angle. The post compositing solution would quickly become a complex project in the same situation.

Also new in Version 7.0 is Sasquatch Lite, a simplified version of Worley Labs' popular hair and fur system. The plug-in can also create realistic grasses for landscapes. Definable attributes include hair coarseness, frizziness, length, color, and glossiness. Hair can be combed to fall in a selected direction allowing the creation of bows, braids, and knots. What you are not getting in the lite version is the fur dynamics engine, wind, full texturing of all attributes, support for radiosity, shadow casting and many other features. I imagine that Millimeter's audience would expect the full feature set and will want to upgrade to the pro version ($499).

Particle systems in LightWave have been substantially improved providing far more control than previous versions. For instance, particles are numbered and can be manipulated individually. There are also new forces available to affect particle animations including doughnut, vortex, path, sticky, and explosion. The new forces work with an improved collision detection system. Other big features include SkyTracer, a very convincing cloud and sky generator. Clouds can have real volume so you can fly through and around them. One feature that will be of use to visualization artists designing for feature films is the ability to set a time, date, and location to correctly predict where the sun will be anyplace in the world. There is simply not enough space to describe the many other new smaller features and enhancements, but I particularly liked the ability to play back motion in OpenGL and edit attributes at the same time using the f-curves. This is extremely important for character animation.

Before stating conclusions, here is a basic thought about LightWave's look, feel, and usability on the Macintosh: What works in an animation program is what you are used to — at least for experienced animators. I will balance that proposition with the caveat that there are interface designs that simply add steps to common tasks. I think it's possible to evaluate those situations objectively. While Maya, Softimage|3D (and XSI), and 3DS Max have a unified interface for modeling and animation, LightWave presents the user with three separate workspaces made up of the Modeler and Layout with a mediating application in between called the Hub. The Mac version is essentially the same as the PC version, and both show the influence of LW's Amiga beginnings. NewTek has not “Macified” the interface. While this may frustrate some Mac users, LightWave has a mature interface with a logical deployment of the tool set. There are also many ways to customize the GUI. I mention this because LW is too good a product to be dismissed by Mac users that tend to be parochial about interface issues.

If you are used to Maya, Soft, or 3DS, LightWave will be a bit disconcerting. The Hub adds management steps that seem unnecessary and was reportedly (numerous citations online) unstable on the Mac. I certainly experienced this in earlier Mac versions. OS X seems to have solved most of these problems.

3D on the Mac has certainly changed for the better in the last two years. Today there are several excellent options after years without any of the “big four” animation systems taking the platform seriously. LightWave was the first of the high-end studio animation systems to move to the Mac, but now Maya is an option. LightWave is the more affordable of the two and the highly regarded renderer can be installed on an unlimited number of processors. Version 7.0 on OS X is very stable. However, I think most Mac savvy artists will find the learning curve somewhat steep. This is because of the unfamiliar (to Mac artists) interface, but also because an application like LW is so deep that it represents a major commitment to unlock its very powerful tool set.