That sounds like a fantastic advancement for LightWave 3D! Real-time collaborative 3D interactivity through a bridge to Unreal Engine opens up a world of possibilities for artists and animators. Being able to seamlessly integrate with Unreal Engine, a powerful game engine known for its real-time rendering capabilities, can greatly enhance the workflow and creative potential for users of LightWave 3D. It's exciting to see how technology continues to evolve to make high-quality 3D animation more accessible and efficient for creators..

LightWave Digital is pleased to present a new edition of LightWave 3D, offering a range of new features and functions to enhance workflow for 3D content creators. The LightWave 2024 edition brings radically improved features to our award-winning rendering pipeline, as well as performance enhancements in
both Layout and Modeler.

New Features
Two New Global Illumination Render Engines
LightWave, long known for the beauty of its render engine, gains new advancements in LightWave with the redesign of the Global Illumination rendering engine, bringing two versions for artists: Brute Force, an unbiased radiosity engine, and Irradiance Cache, an interpolated radiosity engine. Using the new render engines independently or in concert will assure you get the real-world render results you seek, with higher quality and more control.

Two New Shaders in FiberFX
The new hair shaders in LightWave deliver more realistic hair leveraging the physical based renderer. Principled Hair Material is based on the Principled BSDF settings. The five inputs: Color, Cutical Tilt, Roughness, Radial Roughness and Index of Refraction provide a simple interface for spectacular results. With AFC Hair Shader (Artist Friendly Control — a simplified approach) the specular settings are divided into two sections: Primary, for reflection of the front side of the stroke and Secondary for the reflection bounced off the backside of the stroke. Now, you have the option to select a simple artist friendly shading option or complete control for the look you desire.

OpenVDB Gets New Set of Production Tools
Leading the pack in the LightWave OpenVDB roster is support for Partio particle objects. What you gain is the power of Houdini particles with the simplicity of the LightWave interface. Also included in the new OpenVDB toolset is
Advect Point Node – Advect particles by velocity grid
Analysis Node – Grid creation Gradient, Curvature, Laplacian, Closest Point, Divergence, Curl, Magnitude, Normalize
Combine Math Node – Combines grids using math operators
Level Set Morph – Morph between level set grids
Partio Node – Load Houdini.HClassic particle files
VectorGrid Split and Merge – Split and merge Vector grids for further experimentation
Visualize Node – Grid viewer with options

Redesigned Motion System
LightWave 2024 provides the ability to change Rotation Order per item and is saved with the scene file. This allows for an easier transition from other applications to LightWave. Additionally, instances of Gimbal lock can be avoided and items you are animating can be allowed to follow a more natural rotation order.

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