NewTek Announces Free LightWave 3D Trial Edition Available for Download

Great News from Newtek!

NewTek Announces Free LightWave 3D Trial Edition Available for Download.

New LightWave Trial Edition features 24 hours of free online training


The software is fully functional with no restrictions or watermarks for a full 30-day period and has 24 hours of video training on many topics to enable quick use of LightWave's powerful tools.

In addition, the complete manuals in PDF format are available for download, allowing users to reference tools and features. 130 MB of royalty-free content is also provided, which can continue to be loaded and studied even after the 30-day trial period is over.

Pricing and Availability

The LightWave Trial Edition is available for free download immediately. LightWave® v9 is available now at suggested retail price of $895US. LightWave v9.5 will be available as a free update to registered LightWave v9 owners. Registered owners of LightWave 3D® [8] or earlier are eligible to purchase an upgrade to LightWave v9 for $395US.
For more information or to purchase, please visit www.lightwave3d.com or call NewTek Sales at 1-800-368-5441, for international inquiries dial +1-210-370-8000.

Iphone games: Namco for hire

In these weeks Apple presented its Iphone SDK, now finally companies can develop applications and games for this device.
People can be interested seeing that some companies are searching developers for hiring to increase their team knowledge about iphone development: via Gamasutra, I found this open positions into Namco : full time iPhone Games Engineers for Namco in San Jose (CA, USA).
Finally something is moving into the Iphone games industry... :)

Soul of Chogokin Kotetsu Shin Jeeg

After many rumors, Bandai has officially presented its new Soul of Chogokin: Kotetsu Shin Jeeg. This model will be available on september 2008.
Now i'm awaiting (and hoping) for a Revoltech Kotetsu Shin Jeeg by Kaiyodo... :P

Some links for more info and photos:

http://www.japanrobot.it/Articoli.htm
http://www.zonahobby.com/ita/flash_news.asp

Isometric games : 3d character animation test

In the past week I produced a simple animation to test with an isometric style game. My goal is replace my static characters in Metalwarriors with those that includes animations.
But I'm not really sure to do this mainly with for these reasons...
- creating animations for each character means spending lot of time: and how many actions I will do animate? Only a simple walk, or other actions, as fight, death, and so on? Creating each action means create "n" frames for 4 different directions.
- how many Kb these animations will take? This can be really slow downloading times...

However, some descriptions about this simple animation...
I created this animation with Lightwave 3d starting from a 3d character, created as described in my 3d Tutorial: Modeling your first Anime Robot in 3d (italian translation here), then I animated with a simple walk cycle, rendered as separated frames in BMP file format. For a better result, I choose a 17 frames sequence (see preview).
Creating characters in 3d also for 2d bitmap based games has a great advantage: after created animation cycles for a single character, I can create the same cycles for all other characters, simply substituing the 3d models. Additionally, I can create separate animation frames and, by saving in 32bit color depth, I can have each single frame with a transparent background. This can be an advantage for test purposes, to check the optimal size of my bitmaps frames, to have good animations but not a wasting movieclips sizes...

After this process, I can import my bitmap sequences directly into Adobe Flash (name each frame as "animationCyle_001.bmp", "animationCyle_002.bmp"): Flash converts the frame sequence directly into the timeline, each bitmap into a separate frame.
So I can create a single movieclip for my character, and naming each first frame of each sequence into Flash timeline, I can access and play my animation cycles via actionscript.

FPrime updated to version 3.2

via Flay: FPrime, an external rendering engine for Lightwave 3d, has been updated to version 3.2. A number of fixes and updates are in there including better LW 9.3.1 compatability, reversed motion blur, voxel support and a host of others improvements.

Ratatouille Oscar winner!

The Academy Awards 2008 confirms the popular voices who said Ratatouille the Oscar winner as Best Animated Feature Film.

I agree, great movie! :)

Newtek announces Lightwave 9.5 !

Publishing this press release on its website, NewTek Announces Fourth Major Update to LightWave 3D® v9.

LightWave v9.5 Update Includes:

Character Animation Enhancements
New Hair and Fur System
Enhanced IK and Animation Systems

• New Collada, FBX and OBJ I/O
• New IK Calculation Options for Faster Performance
• New Bone Type - Joints
• New Objective Options for IK
• IK/FK blending
• Multi-threaded Mesh Deformation Evaluation

Modeler

• UV Unwrap/UV Relax
• Symmetry Tolerance

Lighting, Rendering and Surfacing Enhancements
All New Lighting System

• New Light API
• IES Lights
• New Spherical Light
• Area and Linear Lights Enhanced

Renderer

• Faster Sampling System for GI
• Improved GI Quality
• New GI Controls to Customize the Render
• Disk-Based GI Cache

Node Editor Enhancements

• Interpolated Soft Reflections/Refractions
• Support for New Light API Functions
• Oren-Nayar Shading Option for Many Materials
• Optimizations for Materials and Shaders

SDK and LScript Improvements

• New Light Plug-in Class for third Party Lights and Light Plug-ins
• SDK Support for New GI Functions and Disk Cache
• SDK Support for New IK and Animation Capabilities
• Set Surface Properties Through the Surface Global

UI and Workflow Enhancements

• Enhanced Scene Limits
• Updated Scene File Format
• EXIF Metadata Support
• OpenGL GLSL Enhanced for New Lighting System
• Image Viewer Consolidation

Pricing and Availability
LightWave® v9 is available now at suggested retail price of $895US. LightWave v9.5 will be available as a free update to registered LightWave v9 owners. Registered owners of LightWave 3D® [8] or earlier are eligible to purchase an upgrade to LightWave v9 for $395US. For more information or to purchase, please visit www.lightwave3d.com or call NewTek Sales at 1-800-368-5441, for international inquiries dial +1-210-370-8000.

Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Enterprise Applications

Via Biskero, I discovered this very interesting and useful article on Nokia Forum: Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Enterprise Applications.

Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Games

Via Biskero, I discovered this very interesting and useful article on Nokia Forum: Top 10 Usability Guidelines for Games.

These guidelines can be used for mobile game development and programming but also for web ad advergames.

Call of Duty 4: best videogame of 2008

During the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences has nominated the best videogames of 2008 in various categories.

Here's the complete list:

Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4
Console Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4
Computer Game of the Year: The Orange Box
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming: Rock Band
Handheld Game of the Year: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
Cellular Game of the Year: Skate
Role-Playing Game of the Year: Mass Effect
Racing Game of the Year: Motorstorm
Outstanding Achievement in Game Design: Portal
Adventure Game of the Year: Super Mario Galaxy
Sports Game of the Year: Skate
Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year: Command and Conquer 3
Action Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4
Family Game of the Year: Rock Band
Outstanding Achievement in Animation: Assassin's Creed
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction: BioShock
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering: Crysis
Outstanding Character Performance: Portal
Outstanding Achievement in Story Development: BioShock
Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering: Portal
Outstanding Achievement in Online Game Play: Call of Duty 4
Downloadable Game of the Year: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition: BioShock
Outstanding Achievement in Soundtrack: Rock Band
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design: BioShock

More info at official website

News found via Punto-Informatico.