***Win95 will automatically recognize the hardware key. DO NOT INSTALL THE SENTINEL DRIVERS UNDER WINDOWS 95***
Windows NT and Install Notes
In order to be able to run LightWave, your system must have *both* the
hardware lock and the hardware lock device drivers installed.
To install the drivers from the CD-ROM, first insert the LightWave CD-ROM, then follow the step below that is correct for your operating system:
--If you are using Windows NT, enter the Win_NT directory and run the
setupx86.exe program.
The driver install software will look for drivers on a floppy drive
(drive a:). When you reach this step, change the pathname to your CD-ROM drive and the correct directory for your operating system as noted above. For example, if your CD-ROM drive is drive d:, and you are using Windows NT, you would enter "d:\Win_NT" (without the quotes). The remaining steps are self-explanatory.
The following features or changes were added after the LightWave 5.0 manuals went to press.
LAYOUT
- The maximum numbers of objects, surfaces, images, and lights that can be loaded at one time can now be set in the config file. The default values are 1000, 1000, 200, and 1000 respectively, the same as in 4.0, but now any or all of these limits can be varied within the range 100 to 32,000. Note that an image sequence counts as only one image, no matter how many frames it may contain. It is strongly recommended that these figures be left at default. If the limits need to be increased, the values should be at the minimum required.
- Multiple clip maps are now supported. Starting with a texture value of 0.0 (opaque), the textures are evaluated in order and if the final value is greater or equal to than 0.5, the object is considered clipped at the current pixel (this no different than before except for there being more than one texture.)
- Some users with poor eyesight and users of varied display devices (such as LCD laptop screens) have had difficulties with the low brightness of LightWave's interface, so a config file option has been added allowing a choice of four different gamma correction presets. Locate the line called "InterfaceBrightness" in the 'lw.cfg' file. The possible values of its argument are 0 (darker than normal), 1 (normal colors), 2 (brighter), and 3 (brightest).
- The layout grid can now be up to 32 x 32 squares in size.
- Particle blur has been improved to account for single frame linear "instantaneous" moves, providing that blur length is no more than 100% (or 50% if regular motion blur is also in use).
- Percentage fields on the Bones panel now all have minisliders
- Control panels now open centered on the Layout window instead of centered on the entire screen, allowing improved side-by-side tiled operation with Modeler, for example. **NOTE** If a panel becomes stuck off the edge of the Windows screen, you can use the keyboard shortcut "p" to close the panel.
- The Windows file requester can no longer become permanently stuck behind a panel. Clicking on the panel may still pop it on top of the requester, but the panel will now automatically move back underneath it almost immediately (causing a brief unavoidable but harmless flicker).
- If the user tries to make a light cone or camera zoom envelope key framefrom Layout, and the light cone or camera zoom doesn't yet have an envelope, the user is now given the option to create one (without having to enter a control panel).
- The surfaces settings from any displayed sample sphere or cube can now be copied to the current surface by clicking on the sample. There is a confirmation requester, since doing this will write over all existing settings for the current surface. This feature has been a common request, and it's useful as an "undo" during surface tweaking as well as for copying one surface to another. The sample to be copied from can even be from a different scene, and if it used image maps or plug-ins that are no longer loaded, they will automatically be brought back in.
- If the current scene has a name, it is now shown in the title bar of the main window (following the program title and a dash). Scenes are given names by loading or saving them.
MODELER
- Added integer input fields to RGB color sliders.
- Added a warning when the user is about to overwrite an existing file.
- Altered Smooth-Shift to operate like Bevel with regards to selection. If you select some polygons and apply a Smooth-Shift, only the original polygons will be selected in the new configuration even if edge faces were created.
- There are two methods in which Modeler shades MetaNurbs. The first (and default) is by software evaluation. Internal testing has shown the software evaluation to be faster. If you have hardware acceleration capabilities and are experiencing GL display problems with MetaNurbs, you can choose to have Modeler shade the Nurbs with GL acceleration by toggling with shift-ctrl-I. If the preview background is black, the software evaluator is being used. If the background is light blue, the GL evaluator is being used.
PLUGINS
'Motiondump' (Motiondu.P):
The default item that this plugin will write motion for is the Camera. To write motion for an object or light rename that item with a dollar sign ($) as the first character of the name. Example: To dump the motion for "Light (5)" in a scene select Rename Light and name it "$Light(5)" then run MotionDump from the Generic Plug-ins popup.
'AddMetaBall' (AddMBall.P):
The lumpiness of the final object is controlled by each metaball's surface name, which must be a number in the range from 2.0 to -2.0 with 0 being invalid. A negative value causes the ball to act as repeller, making ball shaped dents in the final object.
'Smarttriple' (QTriple.P):
It triples quads in their correct direction (upper left to lower right
or upper right to lower left diagonal) depending on which points are
making the quad nonplanar.
TIPS
-Power Texture (PTexture.p) does not work with Windows 95 due to errors in Win
95 Open GL implementation.
- Scenes, Objects and Images must not have any spaces in their saved names. This is vital to dependable ScreamerNet operation. If a space is needed for file management purposes, use an underscore '_' instead. If there are spaces in any of these names, ScreamerNet and LightWave can read them as corrupt files.
Example: "My 3D.LWS" must be renamed as "MY_3D.LWS"
Example: "MY 3DCAR.LWO" must be renamed as "MY_3DCAR.LWO"
Example: "MY Image.IFF" must be renamed as "MY_Image.IFF"
- The Modeler plugin 'PowerTexture.p' can only Load images in Bitmap (.BMP) format. Loading any other image format will force Modeler to shutdown (therefore all unsaved data will be lost.)
- AutoPatchMK (Modeler plugin): Any spline that is supposed to be single should be kept as single. Otherwise, merge multi-splines into 1 spline before executing AutopatchMK.
CREDITS
Import/Export code provided by Ernie Wright.
The Mech Modeling and Animation/AVI courtesy of Ryan "Spike" Dauner (Dedicated to the sleeping stinker.)
Testing Coordination and File Wrangling: Brian Thomas.
Special Thanks to all of our beta testers and 3rd party developers who's efforts helped make this version possible.
