CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

15 January 2008

Product News

LightWork Design Releases LightWorks 7.8

LightWork Design announced the release of a new version of LightWorks - LightWorks 7.8. The main focus of this release is to improve the accuracy, performance and the ease-of-use of lighting, global illumination, tone mapping and gamma correction making the creation of photorealistic imagery even easier.

Key developments include:

Lighting

As part of our continued customer enhancement program, a new simplified user interface has been introduced for Global Illumination. New controllers make Advanced Lighting easier to use and provide improved usability and performance for both experts and non-experts alike whilst also speeding up integration within customers' applications so that the finished product is more user friendly and dynamic.

Final Gather has been made more intuitive as the speed/quality tradeoff has been improved making this simpler to use. LightWorks now includes both diffuse and specular shaders for Final Gather, to allow a wider range of photorealistic effects to be created. There is also extra flexibility in the way that dome lights can be used with Final Gather, again offering improved speed and ease-of-use.

Shadow map efficiency has been enhanced by fine-tuning shadow generation, thereby both increasing speed and becoming less resource intensive.

Real-time Plus

LightWorks Real-time Plus has been re-engineered to provide users with improved performance as well as greater user control. Also, LightWorks Real-time now includes better support for gamma correction so that real-time renders more closely match software renders in terms of colour.

New Shaders

A lit appearance shader provides glow effects to lights so that they appear lit without actually emitting light. This is particularly applicable in architectural imagery. Other new shaders include a speckled shader, horizon background shader and a lighting environment background shader.

New LightWorks Output features

A PNG driver has been introduced enabling PNG image files to be read and output within LightWorks.

For more information about LightWorks 7.8, go to the latest release page of the LightWork Design website:

 

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