Real-time Collaborative LightWave™ to Unreal Engine
LightWave 3D® enters the Real-Time Age for interchange with this workflow link between the Unreal Engine and LightWave 3D®, focusing on LightWave driving Unreal changes iteratively. Multiple LightWave seats are able to connect to the same Unreal Editor simultaneously to enable real-time collaboration between artists. The bridge uses NewTek's proven NDI® network discovery mechanism for easy automatic configuration, and can be limited to single project use in Unreal, or installed as a general plugin for use in all Unreal projects.

 

FBX and New Interchange Bridge
· Work with industry standard FBX data on a whole new level via the new Interchange Bridge.
· Interactively choose what to import / export and how.
· Add to existing FBX files from Layout and Modeler.
· Build LightWave 3D® assets from many FBX files.
· Easily revisit FBX files via workspaces.

Shading Model Customization Tools
The ability to pull materials apart and build them to your tastes is new to LightWave 3D® 2019. There is access to Fresnel Functions, Material Components and Material Integrators. The Material Tools Group has been updated with new nodes to support this capability.

OpenVDB Content Creation
LightWave 3D® 2018 introduced the ability to import and render an OpenVDB fog volume. New for LightWave 3D® 2019 is a set of node tools that allow OpenVDB content creation. You can now create OpenVDB grids from meshes, particles, and even the shape primitive distance estimator. The tool kit allows for live Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) operations, grid filtering including level set tracking, smoothing, dilation and erosion. Solvers are included that allow for fluid simulation and smoke and fire effects.

Metamorphic
· Metamorphic is a multipurpose animatable mesh sculpting and vertex map manipulation plug-in for LightWave 3D® 2019 that works in Layout, and takes full advantage of the new capabilities of the modifier stack.
· Freeform animated sculpting
· Built-in undo/redo system
· Fully-multithreaded sculpting using all available CPU cores
· Pen pressure support for brush size, strength and hardness (Windows only)
· Nodal brush texture support
· Three modes of animation
· Non-linear interpolation of sculpt animation keyframes
· Supports converting sculpt animation keyframes to Endomorphs
· Predictive corrective morph sculpting that works after deformers with built-in driver/driven controller
· Full Motion Blur support

Display Scaling
Support for scaling many UI elements for HiDPI and large-screen displays
Independent scaling options for multi-monitor setups

Bone System Improved for Game Development
The new Bone Type option, Limited Bones, allows the animator to set a limit in Layout on the number of bones that affect a given point to match the limit in the target game engine, and engages real-time optimizations to more closely match the performance game engines expect from a rig.

Edge Shader Node
A node for simulating beveled or rounded edges at render time, to give more realistic results without increasing geometry.

Hardware
· Intel® Core™ 2 or AMD Athlon™ II Processor (or better)
· 64-bit System RAM: 4GB minimum
· Available USB Port (for users with existing hardware dongles)
Operating System
· 64-bit: Windows 7 through Windows 10 64-bit Edition