A new platform has been added, Windows 32-bit with SSE2 enhancements.

Modeler

Modeler in the Windows version now does drag and drop for files.

Layout

• Added drag-and-drop to the UI or the program icon for Layout Windows version, supports audio, lwo, lws, obj, images.
• Added drag-and-drop of image files to the Image Editor.
• Drag-and-drop extended to support .srf and image files dropped into the surface and texture image panes.
• Dynamic Range Limit enhanced to provide a range, with Minimum and Maximum values in the Image Processing window. Negative values also supported.
• Implemented "Exclude From Volume Stack" for surfaces.
• Added the new raytrace functions (see SDK section) into volumetrics and pixel filters.
• Added control script for setting the Radiosity Sample Diagnostics Flags.
• The Radiosity Flags (Render tab/Utilities/Radiosity Flags) are now stored in the scene file.
• Added ability to lock down Z buffer minimum and maximum range for export, for improved compositing compatibility:
  • Minimum sets the 0 point in the buffer.
  • Maximum sets the 1 point in the buffer.
• Added snapping to item position (specifically to pivot point) when dragging items in Layout.
• During Layout's bone re-parenting process, it now notifies plugins of the new bone item being added as well as the old bone item being removed.
• Package Scene has undergone a significant rewrite:
  • New option "Preserve Existing Structure," will attempt to preserve all directories and subdirectories that are under the current Content directory when copying assets to the new content directory.
  • New option "Reload Old Scene," reloads the original scene after exporting.
  • Changed handling of Radiosity cache files,to work with the new Radiosity path behavior. Will also respect file structure if Preserve File Structure option is selected.
  • Added an option for Radiosity cache files to be included in the package or not.
• Added an option to draw wireframe handles and gizmos using antialiased lines. This improves the look of bones quite a bit. The "Handle Wire Smoothing" setting is in the Handles&Icons tab of the Display preferences panel. 0 (default) is off, larger values make the lines thicker (7 seems to work well). If set, this value also controls the line thickness of the grid, if grid antialiasing is enabled.
• Made Parent In Place more aware of scaling sign.
• Two new Lscripts for working creating or assigning handles have been added: Create Handle, Assign Handle.
• Enhanced Viper performance for all modes and all platforms.
• Added new Mirror Hierarchy generic LScript.
• Added Foot Printer LScript for automatically adding footprints to a character scene.

Polygonal fiber modeler suitable for creating hair, fur and feathers, and consists of five plugins:

• Fiber Modeler - Creates Polygonal Fiber models, fat hair, feathers, triangle strips
• Strand Tool - Modeler tool to adjust guide chains using Inverse Kinematics
• Strand Maker - Modeler plug-in to create fiber strands with standard tools.
• Fiber Filter - Pixel filter renders two point polygon strands.
• Fiber Node Handler - Nodal interface for control.
• Added occlusion culling of fibers. Speedup depends on how many fibers are behind in the z buffer.
• Added support for multiple FiberFX instances on a single mesh. Cloned FiberFX instances have a "(#)" appended to the object name in list. Deactivating a cloned instance removes the entry from the list.
• Added right mouse button menu popup with clone command.
• Implemented Feature Request Case 15884: Added stereo rendering ability to FiberFX.
• Reworked mouse deltas for better combing. Comb direction is now independent of starting point.
• Changed clamping of color values to support HDRI. Added dynamic range limits and clamping to LW interface values from the image processing panel.
• Added FFx object list popup menu item (Save To Default) to save the current ffsurface as the default to be used the next time a new instance is created. This will allow the user to customize their default settings. Added support functions to save default to user setting folder.
• Multi-threaded depth buffer raycast is now enabled. This allows the pixel filter to operate with the raytraced cameras, including features such as Depth of Field and Photoreal Motion Blur. Motion Blur must be on for this to engage, though the blur level can be set to 0. The quality is controlled using the Motion Blur passes setting.
• Work has been done in FiberFX on disallowing subd changes after editing guides. This was a major source of guide edit crashes in bug reports. This will enforce the same subd level for preview and rendering. A warning message will be displayed when they are different, informing user that these settings need to be matched when using FiberFX.
• Some optimizations have been made to the FiberFX IK solver.
• Revised the way modeled strand fibers are built. Previously they were clones, now they are shortened on the inside of the curve and lengthened on the outside of the curve, following the modeled strand in a more natural way. See image attached below.
• Guide edit panel now resets its control state when switching between editing objects.
• Added "Random" toggle button for Swirl to make a random starting rotation offset, plus load and save code.

Enhanced IK and Animation Systems

LightWave now has several options that allow the user to control the basis for IK calculation. These options provide improved performance for tuning the desired solution for each animation movement. Options are:

• Base on First Keyframe - Calculate from the first keyframe to the current frame
• Base on Most Recent Keyframe - Calculate from most recent keyframe to the current frame
• Base on Current Time - Calculate based on the channel values for the current time.
• Base on Frame - Select an initial frame to calculate from. Value can be enveloped

Bones can now be either LightWave's traditional z-axis bones or they can be joints, which operate in a manner similar to the joint-based metaphor found in many other programs, while still preserving the strengths of the traditional LightWave bones. This allows animators familiar with other systems easy entry into animating with LightWave, and will improve animation I/O capabilities in the future.

Joint-based animation and deformation control allows for a "stretchy bones" effect with considerable control for the user. A more organic and natural motion effect for shoulder and neck movements can be achieved, for example, or a more exaggerated effect for cartoon-type characters. Even zero-length bones (e.g. isolated joints) can cause deformation (activate them and turn off Multiply Strength by Rest Length).

Nulls are now allowed in the bone hierarchy. This contributes to better inter-application integration and data exchange, as well as improving the rigging possibilities within LightWave.

Alternative objectives can now be set for IK; this control is right below the Goal Object control on the Motion Options Panel/ IK and Modifiers Tab.

Go To Goal
The default is to go to the goal (which is the classic behavior of LightWave IK).

Point at Goal
The second option is to solve so that the item points at the goal. The item's Z axis is used as the pointer.

Pole Vector
Pole Vector is the third IK objective, listed as "YZ Plane through Goal" in the options. LWItemInfo, commands, and LScript have been updated to include the setting. IK GUI formerly only allowed objects to be used as goals; the selection has now been expanded to include all items, but operation with anything other than an object will produce unpredictable results at this time.

A Pole item selector has been added to the item Motion Options panel, just below Target Item Selector. The Pole item complements the target item to define the orientation of an item. For use in conjunction with the Pole item, an "Align to Pole" option has been added as a controller setting for heading, pitch, and bank, on the Controllers and Limits Tab of the Motion Options panel.

Controls are available to apply IK/FK blending per bone and to chains. Blending can be enveloped over the course of the animation.

Soft IK has been added to the standard bone chain setup, with support added to the SDK/LScript as well. Essentially, Soft IK dampens the IK near the maximum extension of the joint, to help prevent the infamous "IK pop". LightWave is the only 3D application to offer this out-of-the-box. Other applications require the user to code or script this function for IK.

In Layout, position and scale can now be controlled by IK, and have limits applied. Controls have been added to the motion panel for position and scale controllers.

Goal Strength for an IK goal can be animated, with multiple goals allowed for an IK chain; this means the user can vary the importance of a particular goal during the course of the shot.

• Bone Gizmo size is now independent of length
• Preference controls for sizing icons and handles are now present as a tab in the Display Options tab on the Preference panel. Size in pixels, a control to adjust bone icons to a percentage of this base setting is available per bone, on the Bone Properties Panel
• Fulltime IK is now on by default
• Compensation and flexing for joint bones now takes into account any bending, not just pitch angle.
• Added bone bulging, which causes a radial distortion based on bone stretching and bending (for parent bulging only bending).
• Made bone bulging textureable.
• Added a general bone deformation displacement texture. The input parameters for texture gradients include:
  • Bend: angle between bone and parent bone.
  • Bulge Falloff: bulging falloff along bone (0 at ends, 1 in the middle).
  • Bulge: radial bulging factor away from bone.
  • Distance
  • Angle from Inside: angle of point along bone radial, with 0 being the direction facing the parent bone.
• Work on allowing bones to be reparented to different objects. This should make it easier to insert nulls in a bone hierarchy.
• The default name for joints is now "Joint" instead of "Bone".
• Tweaked the picking of joints to make it easier to pick them instead of the bones between them.
• When the bone part of a joint bone is selected, the axes are now effectively locked.
• Added option to use double-clicking to enter and exit bone selection mode. The option is in the General Preferences tab ("Dbl. Click Bone Mode"). When on, a double-click is needed to select a bone when not in bone mode. And when in bone mode, a double-click is needed to select a non-bone. The default is off.
• The IK solver has undergone another major rewrite. In internal testing this seems to have produced much greater stability. Maestro-generated rigs now appear to work properly again.
• Made some significant changes to IK, particularly with Go To Goal, to make it less jittery.
• The deformation settings for a bone are now hidden if the joint part of a joint bone is selected, with the exception of zero-length joints.
• More IK solver changes:
  • Better behaviour near full extension
  • Added a check for very slow error reduction, which allows the solver to stop sooner
  • Changed the way controller stiffness, goal strength, and controller limits influence the solver.
  • Changed "Go To Goal" IK to a hybrid second order method, which solves an issue with the chain going nuts when the goal is moved far away.
  • Some optimization if the second order derivative of the motion matrix is known to be zero.
  • Slightly changed the way stiffness is applied. This helps a bit to get closer to the goal near full extension.

Multithreading for some of the mesh deformation evaluations has been added in Layout to provide an increase in speed. The control toggle is located in the General tab of the Preferences to enable/disable the feature. The multithreading will use however many cores you have.

The multithreading only happens in Layout for interactive work, not when rendering. Currently the following parts of the mesh evaluation have been multithreaded:

• Morphing
• Bone deformation
• Motion (application of item move/rotate/scale to mesh)

In v9.5 MorphTarget values have been converted to use object identifiers instead of indexes. This change requires incrementing the revision of the scene file format to version 5.

All New Lighting System

• Improved the sampling for the photometric, spherical and dome lights.
• Implemented Feature Request Case 13690: Layout's Spherical light should have a default size of 100mm rather than 0.

The lighting system is now a plugin API, the new Light Plugin Class header has been moved to the public SDK and is now available. Custom light plug-in user interfaces now appear in the Basic tab of the Light Properties panel.

The Light Properties panel now has a button to load IES light files and displays a thumbnail preview of the luminaire with other information and controls. In addition, there is an IES Info panel. The "IES Info" button below the thumbnail luminaire preview opens the panel. The panel shows the description from the IES file, a gonio photometric graph, and detailed text info on IES file.

User selectable sized dome lights are now available in the Light Properties Panel.

Area lights are now aware of being called for sampled rays. The area and linear light quality have been improved by generating one new random number for each light sample. The maximum area/linear light quality limit of five has been lifted.

Renderer Improvements

• The Oversample option for the new camera modes has been improved. Set Oversample to about 0.7 to mimic the Enhanced AA modes of the Classic camera. The Oversample feature may cause small discontinuities in the image if the scene uses more than one segment to render the image. This is the same limitation of the Classic camera's Enhanced AA. If the Oversample is set to a large value, it will blur the image but can slow down the rendering. A post-process blur filter would be a more efficient way to blur the rendered image.
• The oversample can now be animated via its envelope.
• Implemented changes to raytracer to improve detection and early termination of rays that will not affect shading, which should provide speed improvements in some situations. The control is on the Render Tab of the Render Globals panel, "Ray Cutoff." The default is the recommended setting of .01, which provides much faster rendering with little to no impact on quality. Setting this to 0 will make the renderer perform as it used to; setting it higher can gain further speed, with a tradeoff in rendering quality.
• Implemented the Ray Cutoff feature for the hard-coded shading model.
• Limit dynamic range is now applied to the shaded buffers. Examples are the reflection, diffuse, specular and backdrop buffers. Buffers that are not shaded and just output the shading parameters, such as ks, kd and raw color, will not be limited.
• Limit Dynamic Range render buffer changes - attempt #2. The reflection, specular and diffuse buffers are subtracted from the RGB buffer, clamped and then added back to RGB buffer. The RGB buffer is also clamped after the other buffers are subtracted. This should allow these buffers to be used for post processing when Limit Dynamic Range is enabled. No other render buffers are clamped.
• Added new functionality to the access structures to read and write to render buffers from shaders, nodes and volumetric plugins.
• The Z buffer value for the camera ray is now available to pixel filters that are rendered multi-threaded.
• Multi-threaded pixel filters are now called as if they were single-threaded from the Classic Camera.
• Changed the Z Buffer maximum sent to the multi-threaded pixel filters to 2.0E14f, which matches the Classic Camera.
• Added the multi-threaded flag to Skytracer for raytraced camera support.
• Added cloning of non-multithreaded pixel filters per render thread when pixel filter multi-threading is forced on. This allows multi-threaded rendering when using such pixel filters.
• The render buffers are now averaged when requested by a pixel filter plug-in in the ray traced camera modes. This is consistent with the way the buffers are treated for image filter plug-ins.
• Pixel filters can now set the z buffer depth and alpha when the primary ray does not hit any polygons.
• Implemented the smarter sampling for soft reflections and refractions.

Global Illumination

• Optimizations to improve the speed and quality of radiosity rendering.
• Speeded up rendering of animations when animated radiosity cache is enabled.
• Optimization to speed up the radiosity sample searches.
• Optimization to speed up radiosity preprocessing when the Multiplier is more than 100%.
• Reduced the noise for area lights and non-interpolated radiosity when used in conjunction with anti-aliasing.
• Added manual control for the radiosity gradients.
• Added manual control for the behind test.

The Sampling system has been completely revised, providing for up to two times speed improvements in some GI operations, plus some additional improvements and optimizations.

Changes to the interpolated radiosity modes improve the render quality, including extending interpolation to the first recursion level. Shadowed areas of radiosity are slightly darker and better defined, and corner noise is significantly controlled.

A variety of optimizations have been implemented to make all radiosity rendering modes faster in v9.5. Many scenes will render up to or better than three times faster over previous versions of LightWave 3D.

In the Final Gather radiosity mode, light can now pass through a transparent surface even if Directional Rays is disabled.

Secondary Bounce Samples

Secondary Bounce Samples allow control over how many samples are used to interpolate secondary bounce radiosity, which has proven effective in image quality improvement, particularly for reducing corner noise.

Maximum Pixel Spacing
This value controls the maximum distance in pixels between interpolated radiosity samples. The value should be fairly large (100 pixels or more) to speed up rendering. Large values can also cut down on visible noise in large flat areas of the scene.

Ray Precision
A new text entry field has been added to the Render tab of the Render Globals panel named Ray Precision. This floating point value provides for the adjustment of the intersection precision of the ray tracer. The higher the numbers mean greater precision.

• The default of 6 represents 1.0E-6.
• A value of 0 disables ray trace precision entirely. This setting works fine in most scenes