by John Gross

Now that a lot of people have been upgrading to LightWave 4.0, it’s probably time to talk about some of the issues involving the release. Since the Intel versions shipped first, there have been bug fixes and improvements. The final release version of Intel LightWave 4.0 is the Rev C version (it says the rev on the CD). Many Rev A’s and Rev B’s shipped, and to upgrade to the final Rev C, you have to get the right patch, Patcha.zip or Patchb.zip. Patches can be found on-line at ftp.newtek.com, America Online, CompuServe or a number of other places. It is also available on the LIGHTWAVEPRO Compilation book CD-ROM.

Here’s some of the problems you may run into with the patch:

New plug-ins, such as HIIP, don’t seem to work. I recommend removing all of the references to plug-ins in your LW.cfg and LWM.cfg files and then re-adding them. New plug-ins may not be recognized if there are new functions within them, as LightWave and Modeler will not add the new plug-in line to their config file if it already exists.

AVI Saving is not working properly with Windows 95. The LightWave install overwrites the avifil32.dll file found in the System directory. You can get functional AVI saving again by replacing the LightWave installed dll with the original found on the Windows 95 CD. To extract the original file follow these steps:

1. Put Windows 95 CD in drive.
2. Open a DOS shell and type "cd c:\windows\system" (no quotes).
3. Type "extract d:\win95\win95_08.cab avifil32.dll" (Where d: equals your CD drive letter).
4. Answer "Yes" when asked if you wish to overwrite the existing file.

After performing the above operations, the NewTek AVI and the hiipavi32 animation saver plug-ins should work.

Using HIIP AVI saving crashes LightWave. This one is a bug in LightWave (which will be fixed in the next version) that crashes LightWave when it is trying to render a scene that contains Save Animation information. In other words, if you choose Save Animation and choose either the HIIP AVI32 or HIIP AVI16 Animation Type, you can then render out your AVI with no problem. However, if you then save the scene with this information and quit LightWave and later reload it to render, LightWave will crash. The workaround is to either (1) not save the scene with the Animation Type information and just enter it before you want to render (make sure when you save the scene you clear out the info) or (2) edit the information out of the scene file before reloading it by deleting the lines that start with "SaveAnimationName" and "AnimationType".

Pennello Lite is not working properly. Find the LWPNLO.p plug-in. The PNLOLITE directory containing all of the necessary brushes and Pennello files must be located in the same directory as the LWPNLO.p plug-in.

True Type Modeler support. While they’re not something that arrived with the patch, enough people have had problems with generating True Type fonts on Windows systems to make it worth mentioning here. Modeler’s implementation of True Type fonts doesn’t properly take into account the "hole" in the middle of a letter such as a "D". Modeler will create this as two polygons—one for the letter, and one for the hole. There is a simple workaround for this situation: Simply cut all of the holes and paste them in another layer, then perform a Drill (Tools panel) on the Z-axis to cut the holes into the outer letters.

OpenGL viewer plug-in. Fori’s OpenGL preview plug-in mentioned in a previous issue can now be downloaded from NewTek’s and other sites for Windows versions of LightWave. If you aren’t running Windows NT with its built in OpenGL support, you will have to download the OpenGL32.dll and Glu32.dll files from the NewTek site in order to get the preview plug-in to work. These dlls should be copied to your System directory. Make sure you look for the plug-in, once loaded in Modeler, in the Custom popup menu in the Tools panel as opposed to the one located in the Objects panel. There have been a few reports of the plug-in not showing up in either Custom popup menu. If this happens, check to see if you can access it in the Configure Keys requester. If so, assign it to a function key and don’t worry about it. I assigned mine to the F9 key (like LightWave’s test render shortcut). If it doesn’t show up in the Configure keys requester and you did not change the name of the plug-in in any way before adding it, I don’t know what to tell you. For some reason, on a few select systems, it will not show up.

How About the Amiga?

So what about the Amiga version? After much anticipation and frustration, final 4.0 for the Amiga has shipped as well as all the other platforms. There have been complaints about the slowdown in rendering versus the 3.5 Amiga version, which, unfortunately, you will find to be true. NewTek had to change compilers on the Amiga to produce 4.0 and the new compiler’s optimizer is pretty buggy and produces some bad code. As a result, not all of LightWave is optimized, and because of this, a slowdown can be seen. Unfortunately, there is not an overabundance of Amiga compilers right now and no commercially supported ones that I currently know of. Hopefully, with the resurgence of the Amiga, this situation will soon change, and LightWave can be better optimized for the Amiga.

Speaking of the Amiga, one of the pleasant things about the newest version of LightWave for the Amiga is that ScreamerNet II is supported for Amigas that share network drives. It works the same as the version for Windows and for help in setting it up, see this month’s Painless ScreamerNetting article.

Now that LightWave 4.0 has (finally) shipped, what do you think the LightWave development team is doing? Vacationing in Hawaii? Nope. They’re working on the next version of LightWave! NewTek’s keeping quiet about this one, as they’ve learned some valuable lessons about product shipment announcements in the last year. It has, however, been confirmed (by NewTek) that they are working on OpenGL support for both Layout and Modeler. You’ll be able to see shaded feedback for objects with the ability to adjust surface color, diffuse level, specularity, glossiness, smoothing and light placement. Don’t ask NewTek when it’s going to ship because they won’t tell you… even if you beg ’em to.

Finally, this issue of LIGHTWAVEPRO contains the article index for 1995. (It was supposed to go into the December ’95 issue, but I forgot all about it, and it took the kindness of an e-mail message to remind me.)

John Gross
Editor