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APRIL 22, 2002 LightWave 7.5
Enhancements In addition to these plug-ins and improvements, NewTek has also taken the time to restructure many of the pop-up panels and tabs to make the program more streamlined. The improvements make project creation flow much easier. There were some other render enhancements NewTek had slipped into this fantastic package. The first came in the form of caustic fine-tuning. With filter enhancements, Caustic reflections now have improved focus and a huge reduction in the graininess that used to appear.
Radiosity has been upgraded to include multiple indirect light bounces. In previous versions of LightWave, there was only one indirect light bounce for lights. Version 7.5 let’s the animator crank up the number of bounces to eight for incredibly realistic environmental lighting. A word of caution to excited users; increasing the number of bounces also increases the render times. It is probably wise to only use this when absolutely necessary.  Since Radiosity and Caustics both deal with lighting, I also looked into what lighting improvements were made. Previously, if an animator wanted to set a soft falloff on a spotlight, there wasn’t much visual feedback on how large or small the soft area would be. Now, by looking through the Light View, the Soft Edge Angle is visible.  LightWave 7.5 also includes Shadow Coloring. The artist now has a way of adding color or lightening ray traced or shadow mapped areas to a scene without having to adjust the ambient intensity settings. In this version many of these new features are hidden, and need to manually be added to panels and pop up displays. [an error occurred while processing this directive] A few other key improvements to Layout include: Bone deformations - Using the Faster Bones setting, each point in an object is only influenced by the four bones nearest the point. Expression Builder - This is a wizard type plug-in that allows the user to write their own expressions.  Subdivision Surfaces - Users can set a subdivision amount to 0, which turns the model into a regular polygon object. Several new image and post filters - You can now save lens flares in the alpha channel for compositing work later on.
There is also an Adobe Photoshop exporter (found under the filter tab) that allows images to be saved as a .psd file. The benefit of this being a filter option instead of a Save Frame As option, is that the filter has access to all of the render buffers, which creates separate channels in one file. This is especially useful for post processing an image later on. This filter also allows for 16-bit per channel output. I’ve just scratched the surface on the improvements in Layout, a more complete list can be found at the end of this article. Related sites: • Animation Artist • Animation Supplement • Corporate Media News • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Producer • Digital Webcast • Film and Video Magazine • Film Imaging • Hollywood Industry • Siggraph News • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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