Lightwave

LightWave 3D is a popular 3D modeling and animation package from Newtek, that originated with the company's Video Toaster on the Commodore Amiga platform. It has long been used in a number of film and television projects (e.g., Firefly, Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5) and also in use at some game studios (e.g., Croteam/Serious Sam, Digital Extremes/Unreal 2).

LightWave consists of two main programs, Layout (animation and scene rendering) and Modeler (mesh creation and editing). Both will likely be used by a HL2 model creator, particularly for animated models.

LightWave, like the other high-end packages, has had a free learning version (with watermarked renders and point limitations on objects) called the LightWave 3D Discovery Edition. Current information on the Discovery Edition is somewhat scarce, but it might still be available directly from Newtek or from a number of Newtek resellers.

Half-Life 2 exporters

• smd_plugins - Warmi's SMD Static Mesh/Reference Model and Animation exporter/importer plugins for LightWave 7.x/8.x.

• LW2SMD (Deprecated) - Converts a LightWave object into a series of .SMD, .QC and .VMT files. This converter is discontinued and has some flaws in regards to normals. I advise everyone to use the plugins written by Warmi. /--Tunah 12:03, 19 Feb 2006 (PST)

• Chris Shafer's exporters (Deprecated) - One of the early exporters for LightWave, created for the Resistance and Liberation mod, this had some bugs and was discontinued by the author due to time constraints.

See also

• 3D Modeling Programs

External links

• Lightwave Official site.