LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)

A Closer Look at LightWave

I would like to point out some misleading information in the LightWave 6 review that appears on pg. 80 of your August 2000 issue. First, a general comment: You say that the upgrade will allow LightWave to compete "more strongly" against animation packages such as Alias|Wavefront's Maya, Avid's Softimage XSI, and Discreet's 3D Studio Max. I would counter that NewTek's LightWave has been used in the making of almost every major motion picture in the last five years. To compete means that you are trying to win, whereas it looks as if LightWave has already done so.

A more specific comment relates to your statement in the section about OpenGL implementation that LightWave allows users to see shadows. Actually, LightWave does not show shadows in the OpenGL viewports. However, there is a new popup viewport called VIPER that allows interaction with the aspects of the geometry that you are working on in real time.

You also refer to the Scene Editor as a new feature. But LightWave has always had a Scene Editor--since Version 1.0. What is new to LightWave 6 is the Graph Editor, which has the ability to zoom in and out and give you a better view of long animations. It is the most robust underlying animation curve editor around.

With regard to Morph Gizmo, your discussion failed to mention that this was a tool that changed the way character facial animation is done. Any product you see on the market today that is doing facial animation has an implemented version of Morph Gizmo. In LightWave 6, the developers have built it in and made the implementation work interactively.

You also comment on the lack of logical operators in the Expressions editor. But LightWave does provide you with the ability to have logic operators and variables for a channel or multiple channels.

Michael Sherak Corona, CA