LightWave History

1988 - Precursor to LightWave 3D

Before LightWave came Videoscape 3D and Aegis Modeler 3D on the Commodore Amiga. Videoscape was written by Allen Hastings and Modeler 3D by Stuart Ferguson, giving a historical basis behind the split personality of LightWave 3D. Have a look at the sticker on the Videoscape 3D box to see how things have evolved since this program was state of the art... Of course, the Videoscape solution wasn't the only one available to NewTek when they wanted to add a 3D graphics application to the Amiga Video Toaster back in 1989 - it was almost equipped with Dr. Eric "Juggler" Graham's Sculpt 3D...

• screens courtesy: Ernie Wright (Videoscape #3 and Modeler 3D) and Hector Moratilla (Videoscape #1 & #2)

• Videoscape box courtesy: Franck Lafage

• Modeler 3D box courtesy: Stuart Ferguson (the programmer) and Gökhan SÖNMEZ from AGF, Turkey

1990 - LightWave 3D 1.0

1990 saw the first actual release of LightWave on the Commodore Amiga-based Video Toaster. NewTek had been promising its arrival for about two years at this point, but the problem lay with the chipset for the Video Toaster itself, not LightWave. At this point in time, there were 3D programs available, but they tended to cost tens of thousands of dollars, while the whole Toaster retailed for less than $5,000. The only real competition for 3D on the Amiga at that time came in the form of Imagine.

• screens courtesy: Ernie Wright

1992 - LightWave 3D 2.0

The Video Toaster got an upgrade in 1992 and so did LightWave. Later that year NewTek released the "LightWave 2.5 Pro" slice upgrade. This was the first version to have built in lens flares and some other "special" goodies for the Lightwaving Toaster users.

1993 - LightWave 3D 3.0/3.1

LightWave was still locked to the Video Toaster with the VT4000 that came out this year, however a small company called Industrial Might and Logic catered to a growing number of people that wanted access to LightWave but didn't or couldn't use the Video Toaster (because they had Amiga 3000s or lived in countries that used a television system other than NTSC). IML (natch) created their own dongle (named "LightRAVE" often referred to simply as "RAVE") that emulated the presence of the Video Toaster card so that LightWave could be run on machines without the desktop video card.

• screens courtesy: Bernhard Bazant

• box shot courtesy: Norm Pickthall

1994 - LightWave 3D 3.5

The first official stand-alone version for the Amiga (no Video Toaster required)

• box courtesy: Gökhan SÖNMEZ

• screens courtesy: Bernhard Bazant

1995 - LightWave 3D 4.0

This was the first version ported to Windows Intel PCs and DEC Alphas.

• PC screens courtesy: Anthony Rosbottom

• Amiga screens courtesy: Bernhard Bazant

1995 - LightWave 3D 5.0

This was when NewTek really started to branch out. LightWave was available for Intel and now also for SGI, DEC Alpha, Macintosh, and in its last version for Amiga

• PC screens courtesy: Norm Pickthall

• Amiga screens courtesy: Bernhard Bazant

• box courtesy: Norm Pickthall

Boxshot and logo (lores!)

1997 - LightWave 3D for the VTNT In 1997, NewTek brought out a version of the Video Toaster for the PC platform on a PCI card. It had to come with LightWave as had previous Amiga incarnations, so here is the Video Toaster bundled version.

• screens courtesy: unknown

1997 - LightWave 3D 5.5

• screens courtesy: unknown

1998 - LightWave 3D 5.6

• screens courtesy: Deuce Bennett

1997 - Inspire 3D 1.0

Also, in 97, NewTek released a cut-down version of LightWave called Inspire 3D for the PC. It offered the same ease-of-use as LightWave but was much simpler in terms of its abilities. Still, it brought many people into 3D who could then move up to Inspire's bigger and more powerful brother once they had a handle on what was needed.

• Screens courtesy: Ben Vost

• Box courtesy: Franck Lafage

• Logo courtesy: NewTek Europe

1999 - LightWave 3D 6.0

The redesign version! LightWave got a major redesign and a new element - the Hub - was introduced to synchronize files between Layout and Modeler automatically. There were numerous other changes, such as a new, user-editable menu system, the ability to have multiple layers in a single object along with the ability to keep them in sub-patch mode, rather than having to freeze when you saved out of Modeler. First commercial application to introduce HDRI, and the first incarnation of a new render engine at 192-bit. A first implementation of Monte Carlo and Interpolated radiosity for LightWave3D. Modeler introduced many new tools like skelegons, and upgraded many modifiers to interactive tools.

• screens courtesy: Czech LightWave Users Homepage

2000 - LightWave 3D 6.5

Because of the major redesign, more than a few people complained about the stability of LightWave in its new incarnation, but NewTek was on the case. A year after the release of 6.0, they brought out 6.5. It fixed most of the people's primary concerns, but also added cloth dynamics and Motion Designer 2 - in a free upgrade!

• screens courtesy: Dean Scott

2001 - LightWave 3D 7.0

LightWave 7.0 added new radiosity methods and integrated new character animation tools: motion mixer for non-linear animation, new bone setup for faster preview, new subdivision options to speed up animation workflow. The SasLite hair and fur solution was added, along with many other additions.

• screens courtesy: Dean Scott

Boxshot and Logo (lores!)

2002 - LightWave 3D 7.5

Another free upgrade to LightWave including such features as improved radiosity and caustics, better OpenGL performance, BVH motion capture support, Powergons (polygons with scripts attached), Bandglue, and the well-named Magic Bevel among other things. 7.5 was eventually followed by 7.5b (06-Mar-03), which was not very successful and had a number of problems, and so was replaced almost immediately by 7.5c (16-May-03). This remained the cutting edge of LightWave for a time, but once LightWave 8 was released, a last update to 7.5 (7.5d on the 27-Aug-04) was released to counter problems with Apple's OpenGL implementation in OSX 10.3. The 7.5b, c, and d revisions were the first visible fruits of the new development team's labors.

• screens courtesy: Ben Vost

• box courtesy: Darkside Animation

• logo courtesy: NewTek Europe

• Update PDF

Boxshot and Logo (lores!)

2004 - LightWave 3D 8.0

A long hiatus caused by the split between the original programmers and NewTek management meant that LightWave 8 had to be created by software archaeology - digging through the code in an attempt to understand it. This work paid off and resulted in the first new version in two years officially released on 30-Jun-04. For some people, LightWave 3D 8 was only a commercial plugins collection, but it was the real starting point of LightWave3D Reborn. The new team starts to integrate many of their external plugins and add powerful features like Bone Tools (a complete bone edit system), a new Scene Editor with Dopesheet (to edit keys in the timeline more comfortably) and the DopeTrack (for editing keys inline with the timeline), new rigid and soft dynamics, soft and hard links to animate the new dynamics, new OpenGL acceleration and preview, and many other small but important improvements.

• Screens courtesy: Ben Vost

• Box and logo courtesy: NewTek Europe

2005 - LightWave 3D 8.3

This was the fourth free update made available to registered users of LightWave 3D 8 on May-09-05. It offered improvements to HyperVoxels, Photoshop export and lots of other things...

• Screens courtesy: Ben Vost

Modeler, Layout 8.3 Windows version

Modeler, Layout 8.3 OS X version

2006 - LightWave 3D 9.0

Released Jul-13-06

• box and logo courtesy: NewTek

This is the second evolution (6.0 was the first overhaul) of LightWave and the feature list is very exciting!

2009 - LightWave 9.6

Released Jan-19-09

Layout 9.6 Windows version

• FiberFX Cloning - Provides the ability to place multiple instances of hair on the same object

• Layout Snapping - Allows the quick connection of one item to another, saving time and additional steps

• Ray Cutoff - Enables artists to decide at what point to stop further ray bounces when rendering a scene with many reflections, refractions, and transparency, saving significant project time

• New and Improved Buffers for Export - Enables multi-pass pipeline users to output more buffers (layers) in high dynamic range, rather than be limited to 8-bpc (bits per channel), for greater flexibility

• Multi-Threaded Pixel Filters - Provides faster rendering for projects that integrate pixel filters

• Depth Buffer Normalizing - Allows 3D scene elements exported into film or video footage to automatically blend properly, even if moving relative to one another

• Open to Other Render Engines - Other rendering engines conforming to the LightWave v9.6 SDK can be used directly from within the LightWave interface

• Three New Nodes

  • Car Paint: Greatly eases the creation of a complex polished surface

  • Flake: A procedural texture based upon the flakes often seen in car paint

  • Curve: Allows the creation of complex gradients

• Drag and Drop - Allows an icon of an object or scene to be directly dropped into the Modeler or Layout window to load

2010 - LightWave CORE

Announced Feb-04-09, canceled Jun-23-11 CORE was announced to have a lot of innovative features:

• Complete rewrite, will not have all of LW9.6's features, will introduce new features replacing sets of LW9.6 features

• Internal application structure and SDK expose all features openly allowing easy future development

• Linux support. Equal support for Linux, Mac, and Windows

• Qt cross-platform GUI. Skinnable dynamically via CSS and viewport color configurations

• Complete loss of LW9 and earlier plug-in and scripting backward compatibility

• With Qt, have cross-platform plugins using the same source code. Easier Windows / Linux / Mac / 64-bit / 32-bit support, requiring only a recompile for that OS.

• Internal architecture's full exposure allows all subsystems to interact with each other, e.g. hair influenced by water simulation

• Partial LWS file compatibility specifically if the LWS uses plug-ins from LW9 and older

• SDK now a more vital component to LightWave as it's used by NewTek for actually building LightWave CORE. The previous SDK enabled 3rd party support only.

• Native Python scripting. LScript no longer supported. SWIG - allows many more language to be used to program to CORE SDK (Tcl, Perl, Guile, PHP, Java, Ruby, C#, LISP, OCaml, LUA, Modula-3, Javascript, R, Octave).

• New Collada-based file format superseding LWS and LWO

• Unified modeler and layout, if the user desires. Dockable UI, tear-off menus.

• Instancing

• History / modifier stack

• GPU awareness for on-GPU acceleration of subdivision calculation allowing radically larger numbers of OpenGL preview polygons faster

• Brush editing

• Lattice deformation

• "Construction" viewport plane

Even with these features, what was lost was a sense of LightWave about the program and with a change of management of the development team it was decided that was needed was the use of CORE as a testbed behind closed doors to bring these new technologies to LightWave as it was already known. This led to the release of LightWave 10.

2010 - LightWave 10

Released Dec-30-2010

LightWave 10 is the first new ordinal release of LightWave since 2006. It added three major new functionalities - Colorspace management, VPR and the Virtual Studio.

• Color space management - Because LightWave operates in a linear fashion with regard to color whereas normal everyday colors displayed on a monitor are subject to the sRGB colorspace, meaning they have a Gamma of 2.2 applied, it always meant that lights had to be forced in the past, or colors tuned to match expectations. LightWave 10's colorspace management meant that it was simple to make LightWave behave in a color-managed way.

• VPR or Viewport Preview Renderer - In many LightWave users' opinions, Worley Labs FPrime was their main reason to use LightWave, but there were more and more things that FPrime couldn't show, particularly with nodes needing pre-processing, or the new radiosity schemes introduced in LightWave 9.3. LightWave 10 has introduced VPR that converts the OpenGL view normally found in a viewport to a realtime renderer.

• Virtual Studio - A system for realtime animation in the viewport using external controllers, eg. PlayStation Move cameras or the Microsoft Kinect, to move LightWave characters.

2011 - LightWave10.1

Released Jul-29-2011

Layout 10.1 OS X

2012 - LightWave 11

Released Feb-20-2012

LightWave 11 adds a lot to LightWave, making it one of the most complete new ordinal versions ever. Here are some highlights:

• Instancing - Although instancing has been available to LightWave for a long time through commercial and free plugins, this is the first time that LightWave has the ability to generate billions of polys at render time itself. Instances can be seen in OpenGL and VPR.

• Flocking - Using the simple rules that govern flocking in nature, LightWave now creates huge flocks of "animals" ( in conjunction with instancing).

• Unified Sampling - Previously in LightWave you have needed to tweak anything that uses sampling in all the places that do so. This also slowed down the render dramatically and now it has all been unified you get the concomitant speed-up in rendering as well as simpler use.

• Bullet Dynamics - World-class realtime hard-body dynamics are now in LightWave and are very easy to use - you only need tell LightWave that an object is dynamic for it to be.

• Fracture - An integral part of the dynamics system now is the ability to break stuff apart and you can now do so in Modeler and Layout.

• Virtual Studio Tools - Control Layout through 3D Connexion devices or even PlayStation Move controllers.

• Interchange Tools - Add seamless workflow between LightWave and ZBrush through GoZ or Unity.

• Shadow Catcher Node - A simple way to add an object to catch the shadows and reflections of your LightWave objects in a composite with real world elements.

• Python - The powerful scripting language has been added alongside LScript, but can directly access the SDK.

Launch video

2012 - LightWave 11 SP3 (11.0.3)

Released Aug-01-12 A third service pack release. The sole feature in here is a new licensing system that allows for a software license rather than using the hardware dongle that LightWave has been tied to since it was first split from the Video Toaster.

Modeler 11.0.3 OS X

2013 - LightWave 11.6

Pre-Released July-23-2013 At SIGGRAPH in Anaheim, CA this year the LightWave Group pre-released LightWave 11.6 along with a plugin called NevronMotion for retargeting motion capture files and ChronoSculpt, a separate program for adjusting MDD, Geometry Cache or Alembic files. More details will follow on here once all three are fully released. Released 31-Oct-2013 LightWave 11.6, ChronoSculpt and NevronMotion are released.

Layout 11.6 showing Spline Control, Modeler 11.6 showing Mesh Repair

Features new to 11.6 include:

• 3D Display - Displays VPR or OpenGL in stereoscopic 3D on a suitably-equipped TV or monitor

• 3D Printing - New tools and loaders/savers to help with 3D printing. LightWave can now load and save STL, PLY and VRML format models, and there is a tool that checks the mesh is good to print (no single point or two points polys, etc.)

• Alembic - Support for the open scene format

• Assignments - A set of scripts to help with hierarchical operations in Layout (parenting, targeting, etc.)

• CgFX shaders - Game engine shaders for display in OpenGL

• Color Picker - Because Ken Nign now works for the LightWave Group he has brought his excellent Jovian color picker plugin into LightWave as its main picker

• Compound Nodes - Node container to simplify networks

• DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) Image Loader/Saver - Image loader/saver for a digital intermediate format used a lot in production

• Genoma Spline Control - New subrig parts to add Spline Control features to rigging

• Input Node - New permanent node (like the Surface node) that contains many things that might be needed. A necessary addition needed for Compound nodes to work

• Light Falloff clamping - Now lights can have their falloff clamped to prevent overly bright areas inside the falloff zone

• LUT Expansion - support for more color lookup tables (LUT)

• Matching Perspective to Camera or Light - you can now size up a viewpoint in the Perspective viewpoint and copy it to the camera, or add a new camera. The same applies to matching the Light View with an existing or new light

• Python Reduced Instruction Set module (PRIS) - PRIS is designed to make coding scripts for LightWave more like LScript, rather than C

• Raycast Node - A node to allow you to sit something on a horizontal surface automatically, rather than needing to do it manually. Particularly useful if the surface is irregular and animation needs to take place on it

• Spline Control - A new system using nulls, bones or other items to create a spline that can be animated itself, but also serve as a path to animate other things along

2014 - LightWave 2015

Released Nov-24-2014 LightWave dropped the version number in favor of annual numbering. This new version features:

• VPR in multiple viewports;

• Background Importance Sampling for quicker noise-free radiosity renders;

• Bullet Constraints;

• Better I/O with FBX, Alembic and point cache file improvements;

• Genoma 2 is an advanced rigging tool that is considerably more powerful than the original Genoma built into 11.5;

• Clip mapping is, at last, a surface property;

• Perspective Matching for still background images to better put 3D into them;

• Quicktime is supported in 64-bit versions of Windows

• any font supported by your OS can be used in Modeler

• dozens of workflow improvements

2018 - LightWave 2018.0

Released January-01-2018

• Physically Based Rendering System

• Render and Light Buffers

• New Volumetric Engine

• OpenVDB Support

• New Lighting Architecture

• Virtual Reality Camera

• Layout Modifier Stack

• New Cel Shader

• Layout Parametric Shapes

• Noise Reduction Filter

• UDIM Support

• Preset Shelf Improvements

• New Network Rendering System

• Online wiki-based Documentation

2019 - LightWave 2019.0

Released Jan-22-2019

• Unreal Bridge - Dynamic interchange between LightWave and the Unreal Engine

• MetaMorphic - Animated sculpting plugin for Layout

• OpenVDB Conversion - Live editing of VDB <> mesh conversion

• Undo - Improved system-wide undo support

• Image Caching - Massively reduces memory use for images in-scene at render time

• Material Components - Pull apart materials to create your own look

• Edge and Patina Shaders - Creative shaders for more realism

• Smoothing Groups - Industry-standard smoothing is added to LightWave

• UV Tools - Updated UV tools

• SunSky - new backdrop shader and light type for simulating realistic and fantastic skies

• HiDPI Support - Adaptive UI layout for new monitor resolutions

• Menu Improvements - Searching, mousewheel and keyboard navigation dramatically increase workflow speed

• Updated documentation - Responsive wiki should now display correctly on all supports

2020 - LightWave 2020

OpenVDB Advect Blur

Released April-23-2020

• Environment Lights - New streamlined workflow for setting scenes up

• New GI - Brute Force has been revamped, Irradiance Cache has been added, and a new Grid Bake solution has been implemented

• FBX interchange - Updates to LightWave FBX imports and exports for improved interchange

• OpenVDB - New tools for creating exciting new VDB-based animations

• OpenGL - New shaders mean that LightWave's OpenGL is an ever closer match to a rendered image

• Local AC - Modeler gains a Local action center

• Motion System Order - You can now set an arbitrary rotation order

• Simple Tone Mapping - Tone mapping for F9 and VPR renders gives control over the look of your render without needing to use a compositing package

• Improved SSS - Random walk multi-spectrum subsurface scattering has been added to the Principled BDSF material

• Better Hair and Fur - Two new materials have been added for hair and fur

• Scene Editor - New tools make the Scene Editor even more useful

• Node Editor - The middle mouse button can now be used to scroll around the Node Editor

• Instancing - More control is now given for the placement of individual instances

• Mobile NRC Monitoring - Android and iPhone applications for keeping track of your renders when you're out of the office