Lightwave 8 Features so far.... (2024)

Since people keep asking about what we know about Lightwave 8 thus far, I thought I'd start a feature list that everyone can refer to when people ask what we know about Lightwave 8.

Please, if I leave something out, tell me what it is and I'll keep editing and updating the list so we all know what we have so far.

So, without further ado, here's what we know....

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THIS IS NOT A COMPLETE LIST AND THAT WE DON'T KNOW WHAT ALL OF LW8 IS GOING TO INCLUDE. THIS IS JUST WHAT WE KNOW CURRENTLY. ALSO, BE AWARE THAT IT'S POSSIBLE THERE IS SOME MISINFORMATION ON THIS LIST BUT I ASSUME MOST OF THESE FEATURES TO BE ACCURATE.

• 
  [*]New Content- New sample content, models, scenes, etc...
  
  [*]Integrated soft body/hard body dynamics- What's motion Designer? Looks like our new softbodies are faster calculating not to mention integrated, that means weight maps work on them.
  

  [*]Faster IK/FK

  [*]Integrated IK/FK Blending

  -ngrava says that this won't be so much blending since in normal IK/FK blending in LW, when you switch to IK from FK, the IK targets move to their respective nulls. He says that in LW8 when you switch, the bone IK/FK chain should stay in place. I have't seen any info on that exactly but I hope that's true!
  
  [*]Updated Timeline and Dopesheet- We've been wanting this one for a long time. We also know it will do fractional frames.
  

  [*]Bone Dynamics

  - Use Bone Dynamics to simulate a character's bones being affected by wind or getting struck by a large boulder. No need to keyframe the motions when we have the dynamics for it. Also, bone dynamics respect bone constraints so push that character down the stairs and watch them tumble.
  

  [*]Selectable and editable points and particles in Layout

  - Now we can select those stray particles that fly off course and either fix their path, or delete them entirely. Also use it to fix a bad deformation on a characters joint or keep your cloth from penetrating your characters skin. Bad Cloth simulation? It's fixable now without recalculation.
  

  [*]Cloth Dynamics

  - Want your cloth to rip during the simulation? Sweetness.
  

  [*]New Scene Editor

  - Edit multiple surfaces at a time with ease.
  

  [*]Node based Expressions Builder

  [*]Importable rigs

  New Rig file for saving and loading bone rigs and constraints. Load a rig, scale it to fit, and make any necessary adjustments. Not sure yet if it saves the nulls with the setup but I would assume it would.
  
  [*]New Vertex Map Panel

  [*]Edge Beveling

  - Well, it looks like we have to select points instead of actual edges but I'll take it in lieu of edges right now. Gives you pretty much the same result.
  

  [*]Arbitrary Frame Rendering

  This is great. Actually, NanoGator just came up for a good use for this, you can use it to skip frames to give it a limited frame look like in hand drawn cel-animation...Very cool!
  

  [*]Multiple Mirror tool in Layout

  [*]Ortho Bone tools

  - The ability to use bones in layout like you do skelegons in modeler. Reposition joints, scale bones, split bones, connect bones, etc....

  
  [*]Faster Rendering- No details or confirmation yet. An article in 3DWorld had Andrew Cross stating that Rendering speed was an area that equal emphasis was being placed on.
  
  [*]Save/Load Poses.

  [*]Multiple undo's in Layout

  - Wade says unlimited undos but is that right? I mean, that has to be limited by the amount of memory available. Anyway, we've been wanting this for a while as well.
  
  [*]Animatable UV Coordinates- Make animatable texture effects.
  
  [*]New Particle System Tools
• Improvements to Lscript and to the API
  
• Improved workflow in Layout and Modeler

Like I said, if you think something one here needs corrected, added onto, or I just plain forgot some new features that you know will be in 8, post them here and I'll keep updating the list. Also if you see something that's wrong or not confirmed yet, I'll take it out or put a note beside it.

Thanks to Takkun, CB_3D, evenflow, ngrava, anieves,
PixelRanger, Wade, Sketchjay, NanoGator and Dodgy for the updates.

Also, the bone dynamics recognize bone limits/constraints making it useful for ragdoll dynamics (i.e. push a character down a flight of stairs, turn on bone dynamics, and his limbs *should* bend and move correctly)

EDIT: Jabba has made some good points. It hasn't been specified by Newtek that there is ragdoll dynamics, I just reached that conclusion since objects can be affected by other objects, like the boxing glove siggraph demo, and bone limits are recognized.

CB_3D said:

Has there been any mention of integrated IK/FK blending so far?

Click to expand...

Hi,

The LW8 IK/FK doesn't really work like that. It's actually based on nodes that can be "pinned" or "Fixed" in space at any given time. A lot like what's available in Motion Builder. In Maya and XSI you have to plane out when you want to switch between having IK on or off and how long the transition lasts. Also, when you rotate bones in FK mode, the constraints stay where you left them so that when you switch back, your bones have to slide back to the constraints. The main difference is that this kind of IK/FK is based on a fixed rig where as, in LW8, the rig canbe retooled to fix the needs of the current frame.The new IK in V8 (IK booster) doesn't have these limitations because the nodes (which are position constraints) stay with the bones at all times. It's very kool.

The whole IK/FK blending thing has always been sort of silly to me. Like the programmers just give up and say, "Hey, I have no idea how to fix your IK issues so let's just make it so you can turn it off if you need to." What we really need are rigging tools that are flexible enough to be able change with the action of the scene. Like being able to re-root chains, reverse hierarchies, and basically re-rig all on the fly while we are animating and to have the software remember what we did too. It looks like this is what NewTek are attempting to do. I'm for one am really excited about it.

-=GB=-

First, I like those new "december screenshots" I wait for eight like the others. I don't want to start flame wars, just let me pecify that list with my opinions based on things that we have seen and on things that they don't show to us

hrgiger said:

Integrated soft body/hard body dynamics- What's motion Designer? Looks like our new softbodies are faster calculating not to mention integrated, that means weight maps work on them.

Click to expand...

Because it is based on PFX and FXBreak, one can assume that dynamics in [8] will be point based - it will compute collision between points (actual dynamic object) and primitive (coliision object). If my presumptions are right, It could mean that if you let fall the "L" profile on the box, points of L profile will colide with the box but polygons will penetrate it. I hope I'm wrong

Another point is, that if it is a "deformation" instead of "motion" (even if it is a hard dynamics), you end up with thigs falling down to the floor and colide with each other but the actual objects will be at the same place with no motion on it. It's just another guess, but let say you build a box, parent something to it and let it fall to the ground - the parent will not move with that box, because the box is 'not moving' - just its polygons will fall because of deformations. And I even don't mention things like expression or exporting - there will be a flat line in motion channels. Again - hope I'm wrong

Bone Dynamics- Use Bone Dynamics to simulate a character's bones being affected by wind or getting struck by a large boulder. No need to keyframe the motions when we have the dynamics for it. Also, bone dynamics respect bone constraints so push that character down the stairs and watch them tumble.

Click to expand...

On siggraph videos and screenshot we were seeing just binded characters with wind affecting their bones. If my guess is right, it will (or it was in the time of siggraph) compute just rotation on bones, but it don't generate the actual motion for the 'characters hips'. We can just guess that it operate just on rotations, so ragdoll effects will be impossible with it. If this guess is wrong, why they don't claim with that feature?

Selectable and editable points and particles in Layout- Now we can select those stray particles that fly off course and either fix their path, or delete them entirely. Also use it to fix a bad deformation on a characters joint or keep your cloth from penetrating your characters skin. Bad Cloth simulation? It's fixable now without recalculation.

Click to expand...

What we saw was next generation PFX efit tool that comes with FXBreak 3/4 years ago. But if you take a look at siggraph videos you will see that you could move things at actual keyframes (and everything TO or AFTER that keyframe) but dynamics generate internaly keyframes for every frame, so if you edit that, you end up with very jittered motion unless you precisely edit the whole region of motion frame by frame by hand. There is no option for 'magnet' or 'dragnet' or something like that.

New Vertex Map Panel

Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong but I don't see anything that great about it. It's just panel . It seems that there is a new 'create' item in the popup menu and they add a selection sets to the VMap panel.
And I bet that it still operate in the old way - right click opens the popup menu on some item, but it don't select it at the same time , so if you right click to some weightmap and select 'delete', you will delete the last selected weigtmap instead of that one you open the menu for
I rather see specific VMap functions (like normalize, tranform, quantize etc) on that popup menu.

And you forgot the:

• [*]popup menu on "E" button- that allow you to create, copy, paste and remove the envelope without entering the graph editor. I hope that we will have that popup menu ON ALL editboxes (color, numeric inputs, "T" buttons...). Just imagine that you will be able to easily copy the color from NADIR to GROUND in gradient backdrop at effect panel with two click instead of draging them or manualy write them.

well,

for certain, there is nothing known about what (if anything) is being done in modeler....

better title for this thread would be LAYOUT instead of lightwave....

and no, edge bevel and tools don't count... they don't count as a feature if you simply incorporated an already free plugin.

no credit given.

jin

Well Jin, if any modeler features become known to us, we can add them to the list. So this will continue to be the Lightwave feature list and not just Layout.

You may not credit the edge beveling as a new feature since it was already a free plug-in but can anyone say it shouldn't already be in Lightwave?

You modeler guys make me laugh....

Dodgy said:

You seem to know an awful lot about the dynamics stuff. Do you actually own the fxbreak stuff jabba, or is this speculation on your part?

Click to expand...

I think he mentioned several times in the post that he was just guessing off what he has seen so far and what Newtek hasn't shown us yet. If I'm wrong about that Jabba, let me know.

A few things I'd like to address about what Jabba said...

As far as bone dynamics, I would just think that if bones can now be affected by wind, that they would also be affected by collision objects so you could do a rag doll effect. Perhaps Proton can add something to that.

As far as softbodies...It probably will be point based and polygons will still probably penetrate surfaces during certain calculations. Forutnately though we can now edit those points to correct any misbehaving polygons. But as Jabba pointed out, the things I've seen thus far indicate that you have to edit them frame by frame instead of them inerpolating positions for themselves based on curves. It'd be great if it was that way but I don't think it will be.

great idea for the feature list updates on lw8.

looking forward to some more details on lw 8 soon

Wade said:

unlimited undo in Layout

Click to expand...

They aren't unlimited, nor are they real, full undos. Nothing more than a couple of transformation undos. An LScript already existed that could do just that.

Dodgy said:

You seem to know an awful lot about the dynamics stuff. Do you actually own the fxbreak stuff jabba, or is this speculation on your part?

Click to expand...

I know lot about dynamics stuff in teoretical and practical ways but I DON'T know more than you about dynamics in LW[8]. What I wrote was only a speculation (as HRGiger said... thnx).

If I was mr. Ikeda and wrote PFX, then hardbody/softbody dynamics will be a next logical step, and also it will be point based to. So this was my first guess. The second guess was that if it is point based some situations will be a problem. Just imagine two cylinders - no just imagine two crayons - they look like cylinders. Imagine that you create the disc and extrude it. Then imagine that you have one crayon fixed in space and second falling on the first. If you don't use some collision primitive like sphere or box, the falling one fall through the fixed one. Or imagine those pencils falling on the polygon landscape if everything that colide are points - or two boxes if one fall to another by its tip.

Ok. Let's talk about bone dynamics. You are all right There was a video with zombie that being hit... I forgot that. I must download it again to see what exactly is happend there. But far as I remember, proton was using spring to keep the character together. I don't even remember if all the skeleton was moving or if it was pinned by its hips and just torso, hands and head colide with that boxing glove. I'm just curious why he don't let that zombie fall. I know that that was only an earlier version of [8] but I may just guess that dynamics can't handle it or it will never handle it or they just don't show it . And now I go and download that siggraph movie again