NewTek LightWave 3D: Powerful & Affordable 3D Animation

NewTek LightWave 3D empowers anyone to become a 3D artist and animator. This software stands out for being affordable, comprehensive, easy to learn and use, and firmly established as a leading 3D system in the industry. It’s renowned for producing stunningly photorealistic renders as well as incredible anime-style visuals. This complete, out-of-the-box 3D animation solution now offers groundbreaking real-time collaborative 3D interactivity through a seamless bridge to Unreal Engine.

LightWave Digital is proud to present the latest edition of LightWave 3D, packed with a range of innovative features and functions designed to significantly enhance the workflow for 3D content creators. The LightWave 2023 edition introduces radically improved capabilities to our award-winning rendering pipeline, alongside substantial performance enhancements in both the Layout and Modeler modules.

Ready to unleash your creative potential in the world of 3D? Download NewTek LightWave 3D today! Experience powerful yet accessible 3D modeling, animation, and rendering.

Learn the best features of 3DCoat v2022 in our review.

Features of NewTek LightWave 3D

Two New Global Illumination Render Engines
LightWave, long known for the beauty of its render engine, gains new advancements in LightWave 2020 with the redesign of the Global Illumination rendering engine, bringing two versions for artists: Brute Force, an unbiased radiosity engine, and Irradiance Cache, an interpolated radiosity engine. Using the new render engines independently or in concert will assure you get the real-world render results you seek, with higher quality and more control.

Two New Shaders in FiberFX
The new hair shaders in LightWave 2020 deliver more realistic hair leveraging the physical based renderer. Principled Hair Material is based on the Principled BSDF settings. The five inputs: Color, Cutical Tilt, Roughness, Radial Roughness and Index of Refraction provide a simple interface for spectacular results. With AFC Hair Shader (Artist Friendly Control — a simplified approach) the specular settings are divided into two sections: Primary, for reflection of the front side of the stroke and Secondary for the reflection bounced off the backside of the stroke. Now, you have the option to select a simple artist friendly shading option or complete control for the look you desire.

OpenVDB Gets New Set of Production Tools
Leading the pack in the LightWave OpenVDB roster is support for Partio particle objects. What you gain is the power of Houdini particles with the simplicity of the LightWave interface. Also included in the new OpenVDB toolset is

Advect Point Node – Advect particles by velocity grid
Analysis Node – Grid creation Gradient, Curvature, Laplacian, Closest Point, Divergence, Curl, Magnitude, Normalize
Combine Math Node – Combines grids using math operators
Level Set Morph – Morph between level set grids
Partio Node – Load Houdini.HClassic particle files
VectorGrid Split and Merge – Split and merge Vector grids for further experimentation
Visualize Node – Grid viewer with options

Redesigned Motion System
LightWave 2023 provides the ability to change Rotation Order per item and is saved with the scene file. This allows for an easier transition from other applications to LightWave. Additionally, instances of Gimbal lock can be avoided and items you are animating can be allowed to follow a more natural rotation order.

System Requirements
Hardware: Intel® Core™ 2 or AMD64 with SSE4 instruction set (Bulldozer onwards)
System RAM: 4 GB minimum

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit or better
Minimum Graphics Card: NVIDIA® GeForce® 9 series or ATI Radeon HD 4000 series (minimum)
Minimum Screen Resolution: 1280 x 1024 pixels
Recommended Graphics card: GeForce 10 series or newer at 1920 x 1080 or better