New to 2019

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A lot has changed in LightWave. Here is a curated list in alphabetical order with links to pages that describe the features:

Layout

Empty Volumes

Create procedural shapes that can be booleaned live in Layout

Use Empty Volumes for creating procedural volumetric shapes or converting meshes to volumes and vice versa.

Interchange Bridge

The new Interchange bridge brings far more control over FBX assets including takes and animation from multiple FBX files.

Limited Bones

Realtime-optimized bone system version for better interchange with Game engines.

Metamorphic 2019

Animated sculpting, weight mapping and vertex painting in Layout.

Physical Sky and SunLight (Hosek-Wilkie)

A backdrop shader for creating amazing skies with a new Light Type, simulating a physical sun.

Undo System

Stepping back changes for more than just transformations in LightWave is now possible. Revert changes made in Dopetrack, the Scene Editors, the Graph Editor, and server panes throughout LightWave.

Unreal Bridge

Realtime content created by Tony Prohl for the VR/AR Industry

Smooth real-time conversion to the Unreal games engine for presentations or game design is now possible.

Rotofix

RotoFix is a Layout generic LScript, added to 2019.0.2, that adjusts the rotation keyframes of a selected item, in order to correct for rotation value wrap-around (e.g. heading jumping from 179 degrees to -179 degrees, instead of going from 179 degrees to 181 degrees). This is important for correct interpolation (e.g. 179 degrees to -179 degrees is a change of 358 degrees, while 179 degrees to 181 degrees is a change of only 2 degrees, even though the initial and final orientation of the item is the same in both cases).

It does this by minimizing the change in rotation values between keyframes while keeping the resulting orientation of the item unaffected.

Surfacing

Edge Shader and Patina Node

Shade edges to give an impression of additional rounding geometry without needing to model it, and create shading based on wear and dirt with the Patina node.

Material Tools

Nodes for splitting and combining custom materials to create the surface you want.

Procedural Node

Node to allow access to all of LightWave's considerable non-nodal procedural texture collection.

The effect is subtle and best seen full size, limitations of the AnimGIF format notwithstanding

Leverages NVidia graphics card to remove noise from still renders using artificial intelligence.

Rho

New Rho buffer to extract lighting and shading information from the direct and indirect buffers.

Shading Models

The ability to pull materials apart and build them to your tastes is new to LightWave 2019. There is access to Fresnel Functions, Material Components, Material Integrators, and Material Tools has been updated with new nodes.