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.

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.

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.

New week, new Lightwave Tutorials (part 5)

Another week, another set of (very good) videos by William Vaughan for Newtek's Lightwave3d modeler and layout. This week William published 35 new video tutorials! WOW!

Modeling and animating a basketball net

Introduction to the Surfaces Tab in the Scene Editor

Introduction to the Items Tab in the Scene Editor:

Introduction to Motion Blur

Introduction to the Limited Region and Mask options

How to create custom shadows or have surfaces not cast shadows at all

Introduction to the Standard Material Node

Introduction to the BRDF shader

Introduction to the Surface Mixer shader

Introduction to the Weave shader

Introduction to the Occlusion shaders in the Node Editor

Introduction to FX MetaLink Morph

Introduction to Dynamics Effect and Record Motion

Introduction to the Text tool

Maintaining proportions when creating a UV map

Introduction to Bone Split, Bone Connect, Bone Fuse and UnParent Bone

Introduction to Sticky and Sticky Surface

Creating a Slug using Hypervoxels

Introduction to Make UVs

Creating a UV map for a Head

Customizing Modeler's Workspace Viewports

Creating an eye setup for animating eyes with ease

Introducing the 4 point triangle

Adding thickness to single-sided geometry

Creating an animation of a crowd of people

Introduction to the UV Spider command

Introduction to the Jolt Motion Modifier

Creating a 2D Cel Shade look with the Node Editor

Introduction to Edit Skelegons

Introduction to the Weld, Unweld and Weld Average commands

Introduction to the Set Value command
Note: Not to be confused with the Set Map Value command

Animating a basic walk cycle:
Note:If your new to animation and setting key frames this could be a good quick start for you.

These 3 new videos pushes the collection over 19 hours now:

Introduction to the Schematic View

Introduction to the Target Item option

Introduction to the power of Powergons:

Voodoo Camera Tracking

In these weeks I'm working hard, It's time to improve my skills and back to all my old passions.
So, searching about newer versions for some 3d Camera Tracking softwares, I found this very interesting 3d camera tracker: Voodoo.

Voodoo Camera Tracker is a FREE software and seems to works very well. It can export for most 3d applications. Taken from Vodoo website:

"The Voodoo Camera Tracker estimates camera parameters and reconstructs a 3D scene from image sequences. The estimation algorithm offers a full automatic and robust solution to estimate camera parameters for video sequences. The results are useful for many applications like film production, 3D reconstruction, or video coding. The estimated parameters can be exported to the 3D animation packages: 3D Studio Max, Blender, Lightwave, Maya, and Softimage.

The Voodoo Camera Tracker works very alike to commercial available camera trackers (also called match movers), e.g. 3D-Equalizer by Science-D-Visions, boujou by 2d3, Matchmover by RealViz , PFTrack by The Pixel Farm, SynthEyes by Andersson Technologies. Please consider buying a commercial product, if you need a camera tracker with professional support."

Voodoo Camera is available for Windows and Linux systems; actually you can download the release 0.9.4 beta.

New Lightwave 3d tutorials (post #4)

William Vaughan continues his great work publishing lots of video tutorials for Newtek's Lightwave3d.
I hope my posts in this blog don't disturb Newtek neither William... I just want publish this great work and support the entire Lightwave3d community...

So, these are the newer videotutorials, enjoy! ... :)

Introduction to the Bevel Tool

Introduction to the Pivot Tool and Center Pivot Command

Introduction to Proxy Pick

Introduction to Sketch Color

Introduction to the Rail Bevel Tool

Introduction to the Hide options

Introduction to Color Selection

Randomly placing surface voxels on an object

Introduction to the Julienne tool

Introduction to the Make Pole tool

Introduction to the Helix tool

Introduction to the Sea Shell tool

Introduction to the Triple Tools (Triple, Fast Triple Fan and Fast Triple Traverse)

Introduction to the Collapse Polygons command

Introduction to the Image Control Panel for the Image Viewer

Introduction to the Scale and Rotate Morph Tools

Introduction to the Grid and Grid Square Size

*Creating a Clothespin*
This two part video tutorial walks through the creation of an everyday
clothespin while exploring various techniques and tools along the way.

*Part 01*

*Part 02

*Reference Images*

Introduction to the Reduce Points and Polygons commands

Taking a closer look at Input Fields
*Using LightWave's input fields to calculate and convert units of measure.

Introduction to the Absolute Measure tool

Introduction to the Use Global option

Introduction to Bones and Character Rigging

Introduction to IK: Inverse Kinematics

Building a Reverse Foot Rig

Introduction to Remove Polygons and Remove Vertices from Polygons Commands

Creating a cartoon elbow joint

Check it out in action here

Introduction to Band Glue

Introduction to the Band Saw and Band Saw Pro Tools

Introduction to Fix 3-5

Introduction to Align Polygons

Introduction to Magic Bevel

Introduction to Add Edges

Introduction to Light Exclusion

Introduction to working with Foreground Images in the Compositing tab

Introduction to the RIG format

Lightwave Plugins: Sumatra

Sumatra is a new very interesting plugin for Lightwave 3d, designed by LWToolbox to help the user quickly create vegetations.
Currently the package consists of four plugins working in 32 and 64bit, two for layout, and two for modeler.

It seems to be really easy to use: you can "paint" vegetations directly on your models.
This plugin also includes a objects with different LOD (level of detail) so you can set it to place low polygon version instead of those in high details, depending by the distance between camera-objects.

Regarding vegetations, objects aren't clip maps as Archvison's plugins and libraries, but effective 3d models with polygons.

Sumatra is a commercial plugin, but its cost is so cheap (only 65 EUR for the PRO version) to be your perfect plugin - for example - for architecture rendering and animations.

You can also test the plugin, download the LITE version.

Limitations of the Light Version:
most additional options inactive, painting reduced to 50 polygons.

Sumatra is available for both Windows and Macintosh systems.

Updated my curriculum...

Finally in these days I updated my curriculum vitae. I uploaded them in my website panebianco3d.com where you can connect to download.

There are 2 languages available:

MY CURRICULUM IN ITALIAN and MY CURRICULUM IN ENGLISH

Can I help you? ;-)

New video tutorials for Lightwave 3d (part 3)

These days William Vaughan continues producing lots of video tutorials about many lightwave 3d functionalities. They're really cool and you can easily reproduce his works:

Introduction to the Router Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/router.mov

Introduction to the Morph Polygons Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/mpoly.mov

Introduction to the Motion Path Extrude Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/MPE.mov

Introduction to Toggle Backdrop On/Off :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/toggle.mov

Creating a glass surface using the Dielectric Material Node :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/glass.mov

Using Adaptive Pixel Subdivision to control the level of detail at render time:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/APS.mov

Creating Cathedral Ceilings :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/cathedral.mov

Introduction to the Bend Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Bend.mov

Introduction to the Gemstone Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Gem.mov

Introduction to the Move Path and Path Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Path.mov

Introduction to the Platonic Solid Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Platonic.mov

Introduction to Negative Lights :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Negative.mov

Introduction to the Effector custom object :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/ED.mov

Introduction to Endomorphs, Morph Mixer and Open GL Sliders :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Endo.mov

Introduction to Endomorphs, Morph Mixer and Open GL Sliders :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Endo.mov

Creating a hand-held camera motion :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/HandHeld.mov

Introduction to the Lathe Tool :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Lathe.mov

Introduction to the Center, Center 1D and Center Sel 1D functions :
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/Center.mov

More of video tutorials for Lightwave 3d

William Vaughan is working hard these days to produce lots of videos for Newtek's Lightwave3d; You need Apple Quicktime to play them:

Creating a “Slinky-Style” spring animation:
This one has all kinds of goodies inside.
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/slinky.mov

Creating a rope and pulley animation:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/pulley.mov

Creating trussing and framework with ease:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/outlines.mov

Animating Tank Treads:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/tread.mov
The treads animate smoothly, but the framerate of the
capture software shows otherwise. Give the setup a try and you will see
how well it truly works.

Introduction to Serpent:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/serpent.mov
Covers Lazy Points, Inertia, Serpent, Cloth FX, HardLink< MetaLink and more!

Creating a model with threads using subpatches and all quads:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/threads.mov
Be sure to check out JeffrySG's killer technique here as well:
http://www.newtek.com/forums/showthread.php?t=77441

Creating a Radar Motion Trail:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/radar.mov

Thank you William! :)

Lots of video tutorials for Lightwave3d

Newtek published lots of videotutorials made by William Vaughan for Lightwave3d; they're available on Newtek FTP site. You need Apple Quicktime to play them:

Node Editor: Creating Stitches with Procedural Textures:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/stitch.mov

2 Methods for creating a PaperClip:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/paperclip.mov

Introduction to the Create Skin tool:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/createskin.mov

Creating Multiple Pivot Points for one Object:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/multipivot.mov

Multiple Bumps on one Surface in the Node Editor:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/mbump.mov

Creating Texture Displacement and more in the Node Editor:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/td.mov

Modeling a Tennis Ball:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/tball.mov

Using Multiple Weight Maps on 1 Surface:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/mweight.mov

Creating seams in a football model
Multiple tools and techniques covered.:
ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/w3dw/football.mov