• LightWave with CORE Technology news
• Project news: "Avatar"
• Rob Powers joins NewTek
• Picture of the Month
• Ten24 Photorealistic Male tutorial
• Project news: "The Road"
• Simple skin tutorial
• Project news: Fortune cover

The Viewport Preview Render (VPR) in LightWave with CORE Technology gives real-time  rendering (up to and including global illumination) and supports direct mesh manipulation while working in the VPR viewport.

Update Letter from Jay Roth, President of the 3D Division NewTek, to the NewTek LightWave 3D Community

February 23, 2010

Dear LightWave® Community

Since unveiling details of the feature list for LightWave with CORE Technology to our HardCORE community and entire LightWave community - we have been making exciting progress.

This week, I’d like to update everyone and unveil some first looks at the new working interface we are developing for NewTek LightWave with CORE Technology. We are also excited to share with you our first Camtasia video, which demonstrates the amazing speed of our new Viewport Preview Render (VPR) rendering system currently under development.

456,062 Polygon Tanker Model by Antanas Skucas

VPR is the progressive interactive render preview system for NewTek LightWave with CORE Technology.  Using the exact same code as the CORE render engine, VPR offers a "wysiwyg" result very quickly.  Multi-threading and multi-processor support means that VPR scales very well with whatever system you are using for LightWave with CORE Technology.  It's a very fast, responsive system, with a unique twist: you can actually interact with all scene elements within the VPR viewport itself (as if it were just another viewport as far as LightWave with CORE Technology is concerned.)  That means that you can directly interact with materials, lighting, view point, item placement, and, most importantly, create new objects or edit existing objects right in the VPR viewport.

Moving forward, we plan to offer monthly, and at some stages, bi-monthly community updates (supplemental to the monthly LightWave Community Newsletter) with many sneak peeks at LightWave with CORE Technology as we advance toward the ship date.

• Remember, if you are not on the LightWave Community Newsletter mailing list; be sure to sign up immediately. Visit your account at http://register.newtek.com/ and check the "NewTek's monthly newsletter" box

We are delighted to see such positive community and forum support for what we have planned for LightWave with CORE Technology. Our ongoing goal at NewTek is to deliver solid, tested, and stable new software—exactly the same expectations as echoed in the community forums.

So, with your sentiments, and our dedication to shipping a solid, tested, and stable software application - we have made the decision to move our originally expected ship date from Q1 2010 to later in the year. We will communicate to you the most accurate expected ship date once we have entered the full BETA and testing process for LightWave with CORE Technology.

Naturally, we are dedicated to shipping the best product possible in a timely manner - but we are equally committed to shipping quality software that has been thoroughly tested and production-proven. Additionally, we are taking the necessary time to accommodate the complexities of recent new OS (Windows® 7 and Mac OS® X 10.6 in the new Cocoa® API) and hardware/graphics card advancements in the market, to assure LightWave with CORE Technology runs optimally on the latest industry OS and hardware.

We truly value your continued support, feedback, and commitment to this new release of LightWave 3D with CORE Technology. Please remember to join the LightWave HardCORE team as we remain committed the evolution of LightWave, a world-class 3D application with Emmy® Award-winning features and functionality.

Jay Roth

President, 3D Division
NewTek, Inc.

The Great Leonopteryx took its first flight over the Well of Souls in LightWave OpenGL. Images © Twentieth Century Fox		Pandoran Epiphytes in LightWave OpenGL and fully realized and rendered		VAD Rainforest Gorge Virtual Environment Modeled and Textured in LightWave 3D and displayed in a real-time OpenGL pipeline using Motionbuilder.

Rob Powers is the LightWave artist well-known in LightWave circles for having created the first 64-bit animation for Bill Gates' keynote presentation at the WinHEC conference in 2005. That animation was inspired by work Powers had done for James Cameron's IMAX film Aliens of the Deep, and Rob continued his relationship with Mr. Cameron on "Avatar":


See the full post on the NewTek forum

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Rob's work on "Avatar" was a fantastic benefit to the film, and now he will be bringing his skills to NewTek as Director of Entertainment and Media Development. See the announcement here.



Thomas Mangold is an award-winning German LightWave artist who specializes in innovative print imagery. His latest creation for a German advertising agency is no exception. NewTek asked for his inspiration:

Ten24 Studios should be familiar to Newsletter readers as the author of the excellent "The Patient" tutorial. Now, James Busby from Ten24 presents a two-hour, 10-chapter video course on texturing a photorealistic male. James condensed the course down from the original six-hour running time to tighten it up. The tutorial packages includes the scene and model in the required LightWave format (along with the Zbrush original sculpted character complete with full subdivision history and UV maps) and a complete set of 50 megapixel photographic reference images which were shot under almost perfect lighting conditions in a studio that serve as the basis for the texture maps. While the 3D painting side could be done in any 3D painting application, Photoshop is required for its Liquefy tool, which is used extensively. Ten24 photorealistic male tutorial

DIVE: Visual effects worked on John Hillcoat's bleak apocalyptic film "The Road". NewTek spoke to Kevin Fanning, 3D artist and compositor at DIVE about the work he did on the film:

Kevin: "There are three main elements:

• A sequence of two shots where Viggo Mortenson and his son are walking down the road and pass by a billboard with graffiti spray painted on it.  The billboard was modeled and rendered in LightWave.
• There's a sequence where Viggo and his son are hiding from a road gang of guys.  Viggo ends up shooting one of the guys in the head.  I had to make the head shot a bit more dramatic by adding blood and other bits of stuff flying off his head when he gets shot.  I used particles and hypervoxels to render out various passes of blood and brain/chunks to be composited into the shot.  I also used dynamics to animate little bits of cloth coming off the hat that the actor wore.
• There's another sequence later on where the young boy finds a tin with a beetle in it.  The beetle was modeled, animated, and rendered in LightWave to open its wings and fly away."

Portrait guru Lee Perry-Smith, otherwise known as Infinite on the forum, gives forum members the benefit of his knowledge when it comes to using LightWave for superbly realistic human skin as can be seen in the image above. Read the whole thread on the NewTek forum.


A behind-the-scenes look at how Joe Zeff Design created a ferocious Hyundai Equus for the cover of Fortune magazine. Chris O'Riley led the way with his incredible modeling and surfacing, backed up by William Vaughan. Ed Gabel added the finishing touches in Photoshop to bring the car to life.

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Discussion thread for this edition of the newsletter on the NewTek forum

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