[nicole]

Hi everyone,

We have just released an update for the LW plug-in for Windows. Mac will follow soon. Improvements and fixes:

Lightwave Version 1.5.8 for Windows
----------------------------------------------------

- Minor cosmetic errors in the shader panel have been fixed.
- The glass material preset has been fixed.
- The AGS material preset has been fixed.
- The exporter now skips polygons with less than 3 vertices instead of reporting the mesh as invalid. As a result, skelegons should no longer cause the export to fail.
- The rotary shutter custom camera attributes have been removed. This information is now taken from the native Lightwave camera attributes.
- The "Save MXI" render option has been removed as 1.5 always saves MXI files (the "MXI Path" setting is still available).
- A bug that rendered the Maxwell shader panel unusable in 64-bit builds has been fixed.
- A bug that caused MXI files to be created all over the place has been fixed.
- A bug that caused invalid UVs to be exported has been fixed.
- Support for automatic texture sizing in the Maxwell shader has been added.
- The render no longer fails when multiple projectors are used on objects with multiple layers.
- The code has been improved to better detect when two textures are using the same projection settings and no longer creates duplicate UV channels.
- Motion blur is disabled. This feature will be re-enabled in a future update of MXCL.
- The viewport texture preview for Maxwell shaders has been disabled in Lightwave 9 because it causes a crash. Newtek has confirmed the crash to be a bug inside Lightwave and they said a fix is in the works, but in the meantime this functionality will only be available in Lightwave 8.

Thanks,

Nicole

[Mihnea Balta]

Hi.

This is the change list for the 1.6.6 build released on January 31st:

- Better native material (surface) translation.
- Added support for object clipmaps when using native surfaces.
- Swapped the "ISO" and "shutter speed" controls in the camera panel to match the order in MXCL.
- Fixed: a new problem which made objects with high polygon counts fail to update during an animation.
- Fixed: "front" projectors as well as projectors that used world-space coordinates.
- Fixed: objects with very small scale values no longer fail to export.
- Fixed: when exporting multiple cameras, all of them had the same resolution as the render camera instead of using their own settings.
- Fixed: the plug-in could not load material preview scenes created with Maxwell Studio 1.6.
- Fixed: wrong camera focal length in some material preview scenes.
- Fixed: some material preview scenes which used textures did not work if Maxwell Render was installed in a non-default directory.
- Fixed: using a global scale different than 1 resulted in wrong object positions.

[Mihnea Balta]

Version 1.7.5 released June 19th 2008:

- added support for the 1.7 sky model

- added support for the 1.7 SSS model

- added viewport preview for the sky and environment textures. Please note that activating the preview causes transparent objects to be shown incorrectly or disappear from the viewport. This is a LW limitation and unfortunately there's no workaround at the moment.

- the sun can be matched to the direction of an object in the scene (e.g. a light)

- added SimuLens parameters in the render options

- added SSS material wizard

- added support for EV exposure modes (check the Maxwell camera attributes)

- added a "propagate to all layers" button in the background layer of the image-based environment

- added value ranges for all the material parameters

- changed the default camera shutter speed to 1/1400 so that the exposure is right when rendering with everything set to default values

- reorganized the global render options to fix visual glitches inside the panel

- fixed: the invert texture flag is correctly loaded when importing MXM files

[Mihnea Balta]

Version 1.7.6 released June 24th 2008:

- added a plug-in option which controls the default value of the "Use Instancing" render flag

- fixed: when exporting with instancing enabled some objects are incorrectly identified as instances of unrelated objects