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Monday, 30 April 2007 |
Just when I’m getting my Maya on, Newtek releases Lightwave 9.2. I did participate in the Open Beta, but didn’t managed to spare too much time to try out the new features of 9.2, apart from the fixes to the motion vectors which made RSMBExport possible.
Just when I’m getting my Maya on, Newtek releases Lightwave 9.2. I did participate in the Open Beta, but didn’t managed to spare too much time to try out the new features of 9.2, apart from the fixes to the motion vectors which made RSMBExport possible.
I have to say I’m really impressed with this update as it contains some genuinely great features. The new anti-aliasing and adaptive sampling is just great, and works much more intuitively than the legacy stuff, and the photo real motion blur is fantastic. This used to be a real problem with Lightwave’s renderer (hence why I use ReelSmartMotionBlur almost exclusively up until now) as it was very hard to get smooth movement, even at extremely high anti-aliasing levels. I had big problems with this on the transport plane propellers for the Impact challenge entry. For the high-res still, even at Extreme High antialias, jaggies in the motion blur were extremely obvious. In the end I resorted to retouching the image in photoshop directly to remove the jaggies, but the video still shows this issue all over. So all in all, the new renderer features are a big improvement.
The new radiosity features seem really good also, and much faster than the old radiosity solution. It’s now looking much more attractive to use radiosity for general every day use and the option to cache (albeit not over screamernet) is long overdue. The new material nodes for the surface editor are great too, and very powerful.
This update feels like what Lightwave 9 should be, and definitely feels a lot better than v8. I still feel a little indifferent about the future of Lightwave, particularly on the animation front. Having been playing with Maya for rigging and animation for the last couple of months, it seems like Lightwave’s design is inherently inflexible for doing the sort of advanced rigging and setup that makes Maya such a powerhouse, but updates like 9.2 will keep me coming back to Lightwave at least some of the time. It’s still a great package, let’s hope Newtek can pull another rabbit out of the hat for the next update.
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