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DECEMBER 12, 2001 NewTek LightWave [7] for the Mac  No, we're not trying to pull a fast one on you here by dusting off another review, slapping a fresh coat of paint on it and calling it ALL NEW! After reading Stephen Schleicher's review of LightWave [7] a couple of weeks ago, the crew over here at Creative Mac decided that Mac users might want a Mac-only look at NewTek's venerable 3D program to complement the earlier review. In light of the fact that Mac users may not be at all familiar with LightWave and that LightWave [7] is the first "official" LightWave release to run natively on Mac OS X, we're going to try to figure out what's in it for the Mac folk. I think I need to say "Mac" a few more times.
I've been a happy LightWave user for more than three years now, but it's been over on the Windows side. In fact, the number of choices in 3D animation software, LightWave included, is one of the reasons I left the Mac lo those many years ago. Yes, I know, I know. LightWave has been available to Mac users for quite a while now. But judging from the large number of negative, frustrated and angry posts from Mac LightWavers on Newtek's own community message boards, the typical Mac LightWave experience to date could be described as buggy at best, and downright unusable at worst. Well, the advent of Mac OS X seems to be leveling the 3D playing field a bit. While Mac users might not have all the choices of 3D hardware and software their Windows-based colleagues currently enjoy (yet), OS X provides a solid foundation for developers to bring their most demanding 3D applications to. [an error occurred while processing this directive]  So, this being my first hands-on experience with any Mac version of LightWave, I'm interested in answering two main questions. One, has NewTek managed to overcome the stability and performance problems that, by all accounts, have sullied the good NewTek name for Mac users? NewTek, to their credit, had a Carbonized preview version of LightWave 6.5 available to Mac users while OS X was still in Public Beta, so we'll see if their early adoption paid off. Secondly, the announcement of Lightwave [7] at Siggraph came as something of a surprise to many, since NewTek had added so much between version 6 and 6.5 (and at no charge to boot), and they seemed to be pushing 6.5 pretty hard before the announcement of version 7. So what, if anything, was added to 7 to justify slapping down between $500 and $600 bones for the upgrade? The answers to these questions and many more await, so let's get right to it.
What it does In a nutshell, LightWave is a very full-featured 3D modeling and animation package. On the PC side, it's been mentioned in the same breath as Discreet's 3D Studio Max and even Alias/Wavefront's Maya. On the Mac, it's probably most comparable to Electric Image Universe, and since Maya's over here now too, let's throw that in as well. LightWave has managed to carve a decent niche for itself in broadcast graphics in it's 10+ year history (which began on the Amiga, incidentally), and you've probably seen LightWave in action on shows like Enterprise and Roughnecks. Now that we've had the Cliffs Notes version, let's get more into the guts of the program. Interface The first thing you'll notice when you fire up LightWave is that it isn't a single, integrated program. It's actually three programs (Figure 1). NewTek has split LightWave's modeling and animation into Modeler and Layout, respectively, with a mini-app called the hub serving as the traffic cop between the two. Splitting the functions of the program up like this has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on how you like to work. If you like to model something, surface it, add it to a scene and animate it before moving on to the next object, the multiple-program approach may be more hassle than you're used to. But if you like to divide your tasks into modeling, surfacing and animation, you'll probably find the separate programs very much to your liking. The Hub was instituted in version 6 to bridge the gap between the Layout and Modeler programs by keeping an eye on the model and surface resources used by both programs, but its level of control over the two and, ultimately, it's overall usefulness is very much open to debate. Loathed by some, loved by others, largely ignored by the rest, the Hub remains somewhat of a stopgap measure and has unfortunately not been enhanced in version 7. 
Fig. 1: The three faces of LightWave. The foreground window is Layout, Modeler is in the background, and the tiny window floating around the top right is the Hub.
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