Aside from all of those, there have been the standard improvements made to the UI, improvements to the speed of the (alrady lightning fast) rendering engine, as well as improvements to caustics, radiosity, HDRI, surface editors, realtime OpenGL previews, and I even heard they added an updated Lens Flare system (and here I thought they couldn't make it any better.). Phew! Well, those are a few of the added features and improvements. Phantom subpatch selector: allows you to directly select the underlaying NURBS curve to edit when working on subpatch objects. Voxel Baking: allowing you to bake your volumetrics for incredibly fast volumetric rendering Digital Confusionâ„¢: an advanced depth of field filter, which adds more realism to the standard depth of field by calculating hidden geometry for more accurate blurring. interparticle collision and massive amounts of options and control added to the particle system (particle groups, event-driven group changes) OpenGL graph editor: now the already invaluable graph editor utilizes OpenGL, allowing you to edit hundreds of curves while seeing the results in realtime (on your objects) Sasquatch Hair/Fur built in: the worlds fastest and most beautiful hair rendering engine is now built right into LightWave's own - giving you power to create surface hair, fur, long strands, etc - right out of the box (no need for those $500 plugins anymore). non-linear animation: the most powerful character and cimema animation system there is, allowing you to create hierarchial motions, expressions, motion curves then letting you blend them together in a non-linear fashion for unsurpassed control.
Awesome control over parameters, making changes across volumes of objects as simple as one can imagine it. spreadsheet editor: a robust layout for editing all scene objects, lights, cameras, bones, motions, channels, and well everything else.
Here's a short list of a few of the new features: Not only is LightWave available NOW, but after looking into just what they enhanced and added with this version, I can't get it off my mind. I gather some of you do that now.I'm shocked. If it gets real bad, just reinstall the OS and the browser. It is cheaper and quicker to have a email and browsing machine and one for work. Regardless, I am no longer willing to go through a lengthly learning curve trying in vain to guard myself against foul deeds on the internet. Maybe now the virus writers will turn there attention to hacking Vista and leave XP alone. In reading the review, most of the hype is about security. The addressing of RAM is critical simply because swapping out gigantic applications programs to disk, even the fastest disk, killls performance. Just booting up and loading applications. And, I am not talking about complicated renderings. One thing I have noticed over the years, despite exponential growth in hardware performance, the speed of the interface (running software current at the time) doesn't get much faster. The said part here is that the software vendors will have market pressure to dance with Vista, not for better performance, but to accommodate the potential customers who buy new computers which will come with Vista.
Just visualize Version 10 coming out concurrently with a new MS system. Once we reach that point I suspect Vista will be a great OS and will eventually be worth having. Given that this won't happen overnight I would strongly suggest that anyone considering Vista hold off until the driver manufacturers have release quality drivers available. This, however, is rather typical of OS releases - Microsoft seems to create new hardware standards with each release that basically means you have to wait until the Hardware catches up with the operating system. Given that they have had quite a long time to work on this I am surprised to see that the drivers still are not complete. When I installed the beta drivers I get fast performance again but I have other display problems that appear to be a result of the poor state of the driver development. At this point both ATI and Nvidia only have beta drivers available. OpenGL will be supported with the drivers from the video card manufacturers. I talked to ATI support today and in typical support fashion was basically blown off.