**************************************************************************** LIGHTWAVE 5.0 UPDATE The following features or changes were added after the LightWave 5.0 manuals went to press. LAYOUT - ******NOTE********NOTE***********NOTE***********NOTE********NOTE******** - Due to mis-alignment of the planets, exiting to the switcher and returning to Layout more than once causes the Toaster to lock up- consider yourselves warned. Once the planets realign themselves, we'll make a patch available. - ******NOTE********NOTE***********NOTE***********NOTE********NOTE******** - Through combined research between Digital Domain and NewTek a new option called Enhanced Antialiasing is available. This greatly improves antialiasing quality by using almost twice as many samples for each pixel and filtering them more intelligently. With motion blur or depth of field activated, there is only a small increase in render time which is constant for a given resolution and number of passes. - New bone strength falloff options are now available for object skeletons. These include inverse distance to the fourth power, to the eighth power, and to the sixteenth power. All of these greatly weaken the influence of bones on distant points while retaining their power over nearby points. They have been found to cause deformations more like what users expect, making bone setup more intuitive. The Limited Range option should no longer be needed in most cases, resulting in smoother bends at joints. For technical reasons, all bones in a particular skeleton must use the same falloff formula, but this is generally desirable anyway. The old inverse square law is still used when old scenes are loaded (so they will still work the same,) but for new skeletons,inverse fourth power is the default. In addition to the tighter control options, a looser control option (inverse distance) is available, these offer far less control. Try this option for jelly like objects. This is not useful for limbed creatures. - Motion and envelope graphs can now be scrolled vertically (using the right mouse button), and the Plot Limits requester has new edit fields for the upper and lower limits of the vertical plot axis. - Related channels are shown in motion graphs using grey. For example, when heading is the current edit item, pitch and bank are shown in grey. - The "S" keyboard shortcut has been added to save the current scene. - The maximum number 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 recommended that these figures be left at default. Increasing these values will require more memory. 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). - If the user tries to make a light cone or camera zoom envelope key frame from 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). MODELER - Added "InterfaceBrightness" to the config file. For those who have difficulties with the low brightness of Modeler's interface, this allows a choice of four different gamma correction presets. Locate the line called "InterfaceBrightness" in the 'lwm.cfg' file. The possible values of its argument are 0 (darker than normal), 1 (normal colors), 2 (brighter), and 3 (brightest). - 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. PLUGINS - 'Comments' (Comment.P): Allows saving comments with objects/lights/ camera. Enter any comments you wish to have with the items and they will be saved with the scene file. - 'Rainbow' (Rainbow.p): A pixel-filter plug in that makes rainbows. - 'Film Expand' (Storybrd.P): Supports Odd or Even Field dominant output. When Film Expand is selected, a 2nd panel pops up. The default choice is Even Field dominant (Odd Field Dominant toggled off.) You can select from any of 5 output formats: Targa, SGI, Tiff, Pict or JPEG. - 'Point Reduction' (Pntred.P): There are four preset threshold settings, as well as a custom setting. Operations may be undone and re-executed to find the proper level of reduction. This plugin is especially useful with text objects. - 'MathFilter' (LWMath.P) EXAMPLE EQUATIONS: Try putting a little wave in the hue channel, like a rainbow: (1+sin(_pi*x/320))/2 Try swapping the color channels: Red = g, Green = b, Blue = r, or make the saturation of the bkg image look cool by giving it a little nudge like + or - 0.2 (20%), or set it to some number and replace. If you want to use only the alpha parts, multiply everything by "a". For just the bkg, multiply by "(1-a)". There is also a noise (x,y,z) function you can experiment with. - 'PAL_LEGALIZE, NTSC_LEGALIZE'(HotVideo.P): These plugins scan the output for pixels with RGB values that will give "unsafe" values of chrominance signal or composite signal amplitude when encoded into an NTSC or PAL color signal. Such illegal pixels can be corrected by reducing either its luminance or its saturation. Alternatively, the pixels can be colored black. Legal pixels will have a composite signal amplitude maximum of 110 IRE, and a maximum chroma amplitude of 50 IRE. GENERAL TIPS - The Modeler Plugins path may be edited in the config file (mod-config). Locate the 'PluginDirectory' line and after it enter the full path to the Modeler plugins. Example: PluginDirectory HD0:NEWTEK/PLUGINS/MODELER - Scenes, Objects and Images must not have any spaces in their saved names. This is vital to dependable ScreamerNet operation. Use an underscore '_' instead. If there are spaces in these names, ScreamerNet and LightWave may read them as corrupt files. Example: "MY 3DCAR.LWO" must be renamed as "MY_3DCAR.LWO" "MY Image.IFF" must be renamed as "MY_Image.IFF" - 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 - FlyerClip saving and loading code provided by Pat Brouilette. - The mech models and animation/AVI courtesy of Ryan "Spike" Dauner - File wrangling: Brian Thomas.(Thanx Brian!!) - New Guy on the Block: Chris Garner - Special thanks to all of our Beta Testers, their efforts helped make this version possible.