NewTek today announced the release of LightWave 3D®2019, a new edition of the production-proven graphics and animation package that refines the artist’s workflow to make creation of complex, photo-real animation and imagery faster and more efficient. Leading the list of improvements are the revolutionary new integration tools with Unreal Engine for real time data transfer to the world’s leading game engine. The system performs automatic discovery to make the workflow entirely seamless.

“Game engines have become the predominant real-time rendering and visualization tools for 3D, far beyond their use in video game development,” said Dr. Andrew Cross, president and CTO for NewTek. “We recognize the importance of this trend, which offers so many advantages including the increase in productivity for 3D artists, vast savings of time and resources, and limitless new ways to create and visualize. Imagine everything from video games to virtual sets, animated TV series to feature film pre-vis, interactive architectural visualization and more all in real-time.”

Another major advance for the 3D artist is the new Metamorphic system, which brings multipurpose animatable mesh sculpting and painting to Layout. Fully multi-threaded for fast operation, Metamorphic includes a wide range of brush options and controls, multiple animation modes, nonlinear interpolation, motion blur support and much more.

ightWave 2019 includes additional enhancements for animators. Among these is a new ‘Limited Bones’ mode for the character animation system. This provides the ability to match the number of bones able to affect a given point to the game engine in use. The new mode also has real-time optimizations to more closely match the performance that game engines expect from a bone system. Modeler’s enhancements for game development include new UV and UDIM tools, as well as support for smoothing groups, which allow for fine-tuned control of the contouring of models.