New to 2020

Speed up your Scene Editor use with additions to Layout 2020.

• Scene / Dope Editor improvements

Rotation orders can now be changed in Layout.

There is now a default Environment light in all new scenes.

• Streamlining Environment systems

You can now use the middle mouse button to scroll around the node editor's interface. No keyboard modifiers needed.

Updates to LightWave FBX imports and exports mean that interchange with other applications is better than ever.

Additional tools for OpenVDB mean that the rendering and animation of simulations of complex particle systems are made simpler.

• OpenVDB: New Tools

New static Surface instance toggle speeds up surface instancing for Octane users.

• Static instances

Offset Normal system for nodal instance placement

• Offset Normal Instances

New instances are by default use Local instead of World Transformation Handling.

Rectangular Arrays can be aligned directly in the interface, without needing a node setup.

Updated OpenGL shaders mean your work is closer than ever to the final render in the viewport.

LightWave 2019.1.4 OpenGL compared with LightWave 2020 OpenGL

Local Action Centers give new power to modeling.

• Local Action Centering

Examples of Principled and AFC hair by Mauro Corveloni

Two new hair shaders give users the choice of how best to create the look of their hair.

• New Principled Hair Material added to FiberFx

• New AFC Hair shader for FiberFX

SSS Panther by Andrew Comb

Turtle showing SSS, and tone mapping, by Tim Laird

We have added Random walk multi-spectrum subsurface scattering to the Principled BDSF material. Technicalities aside, this means better SSS for your renders.

• Random walk multi-spectrum SSS in the PBSDF material

LightWave has a revamped Brute Force GI engine and has added an Irradiance Cache engine. There's a new baking scheme, including a grid cache bake for scenes when you're not sure where the camera will go next.

• New GI with primary and secondary bounce plug-ins

• Grid-based Irradiance Cache generation

Applications for iOS and Android mean that you can monitor the progress of your render not chained to your desk!

• Mobile NRC monitoring

First image: Standard render. Second image: Rendered with the ACES Filmic tone map operator.

Control the look of your rendered output.

• Tone mapping