By Wes Beckwith, Steve Warner, Robin Wood
* Publisher: Wordware Publishing, Inc.
* Number Of Pages: 614

Product Description:
In this collective wisdom, you will learn about hidden software features, times-saving tricks, and professional techniques for achieving better results.

Summary: A Five Star-Rating Isn't Enough!
Rating: 5

There are lots of great books and DVDs available to teach the intracasies of Lightwave. This one is a stand-out! Densely packed with useful little tricks that you probably won't find anywhere else, this indispensible book can't help but increase your productivity and enjoyment of Lightwave 3D. You won't get just one author's School of Hard Knocks-earned knowledge, you get to learn from the experiences of thirty! This book is a must-have that you'll reach for again and again. This little gem proudly sports the most worn covers of any Lightwave reference book on my (full) shelf.

LightWave® v9 is the perfect combination of power, speed and value. Long considered one of the easiest 3D animation systems to learn and use, LightWave 3D® is versatile enough for any application from award-winning visual effects to stunning hi-res print graphics, dynamic video games, powerful motion graphics and more. LightWave offers modeling, animation, dynamics, volumetric rendering, particle effects and a motion picture quality rendering engine with unlimited render nodes making LightWave the centerpiece of the most cost effective 3D production pipelines in the world.

LightWave 3D is a complete solution right out of the box that includes three different operating systems to meet your particular production requirements: Windows® 32-bit, Windows 64-bit and Macintosh®. LightWave for each operating system comes with unlimited render nodes. LightWave also supports the latest generation of dual-core and multi-core processor systems at no additional cost.

LightWave v9 introduces new interface paradigms, such as a Node Editor for materials and surfaces, volumetric lights, and displacements. Exciting new physically correct cameras have been added, allowing artists to recreate any real world camera lens, and have footage rendered in LightWave match real world photography (a must for compositing CGI and real footage together). These cameras can also be extended into the hyper-real, or even bizarre, as any mesh object can itself be made into a camera and record a scene. The possibilities are limitless.

New techniques for displacement mapping, and support for ZBrush® displacements have been added. New shading models, such as Blinn, Oren- Nayar, and Ambient Occlusion now allow for a tremendous versatility for artists no longer bound by the original shading model in previous versions of LightWave. Of particular note are the new shaders for sub-surface scattering, anisotropic specular and refl ection shaders (which allow for hromatic aberration), easy to use and offering a spectacular visual impact.