Allen Hastings, creator of LightWave Layout and the toolkit to make LightWave cross platform compliant, and architect of the Plug-in structure.
by Marc Halpern
In attendance :
Allen Hastings, creator of LightWave Layout and the toolkit to make LightWave cross platform compliant, and architect of the Plug-in structure.
Stuart Ferguson, creator of Modeler and the toolkit to make LightWave cross platform compliant, and architect of the Plug-in structure.
Jason Linhart, LightWave project specialist, creates the demo animations for new features, and is the actual creator of the LightWave logo .
Steve Worley, (not on dais) is an unofficial member of the LightWave development team, we are going to be bringing him in closer and closer.
Fori Owurowa, creator of Freeform3D, a fantastic 3D spline based modeling program for the Amiga and an Open GL Preview Shader Plug-in.
Arnie Cachelin, is a member of the Alcatraz group, responsible for Arrex support and CG for the Switcher, works with 3rd Party developers and with XAOS on the Pennello project. He is our Arrex Guru and the man who brought you "Center".
Brad Peebler, moderator, LightWave Product Manager at NewTek. I call the guys and hassle them as to when features are going to get done.
Brad: LightWave is going to be faster and better! Thank you very much. Before we get to features, one big thing for LightWave is growing the market. A lot of people worried recently with the acquisition by Microsoft of SoftImage, that it makes them a competitor. This makes me very happy and you should be too. This means that 3D is a legitimate market, a market that grows, and will provide a lot more job opportunities. Every time Microsoft gets involved in an area you know that means that they're serious about that area and they are going to grow that area and makes it a larger market so our piece of the pie is going to get larger at the same time, so I'm happy about that.
Of course you know that we dominate the feature television market which is things like SeaQuest, BABYLON5, and SPACE. You can't turn on the TV without seeing LightWave 3D even in the advertising like the M&M commercial and the Raid spot. When I was up in San Francisco recently Arnie and David Hootcher another member of the LightWave team were watching SPACE with me, and during the commercial break there was the M&M spot. I said, "Boy isn't this what they all want LightWave TV." A short two years ago when BABYLON 5 first came on the air, we would all run into the boardroom to see what we would then refer to as the Toaster generated imagery. Now if we did the same thing we would be stuck in there all the time. It's on constantly. It's exciting. There are other markets out there.
Although we are going to continue to concentrate on that market which we see as a cornerstone for us. We are going to start growing into the Games market. Which we see as a real big future for LightWave. It makes so much sense the way the Modeler functions. There are several companies which have already patterned their real time engines around the LightWave object format. We have seen some very impressive things at Interplay. A new company called Origins has a new game called Ultima 9, also based on LightWave. A company in San Diego called Blue Sky has a just recently done a product called Vectorman for Sega. All the images you see in their TV commercials were generated in LightWave. They are another one of what I call our extended family, similar to Steve Worley. We have a very bright group up here, but to compete with the Microsofts and the Autodesks of the world we've got to grow our development capabilities and we're doing that in a virtual office environment.
These two guys (Allen and Stuart) are in Palo Alto, Arnie is San Francisco, Jason and I are in Topeka and Fori is in Brooklyn. So we're spanning coast to coast now with our virtual office principal. Blue Sky is a game development company we're working very close together with to bring tools specific to the Game market. Blue Sky will be up kicking around here today. It's a good example of how we are expanding LightWave with some key partners.
Other markets are Internet website creation, Arnie Cachelin has done a fantastic Plug-in of VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language, utilizing Modeler to create LightWave objects and saving them out in VRML format to use them in websites. This allows you to have Internet websites with 3D objects that you can maneuver in real time. This is cutting edge and just starting to be used now. As peoples machines get faster at home this makes it possible to cruise the Internet in the way it was meant to be, in a true 3D virtual reality universe. To date we have "the most robust implementation of VRML export" according to Mark Gowin who works on the VRML spec team. We worked very closely with him to get that done.
Another area we will be going into is in multimedia creation. Anywhere there is a need for 3D we hope to have a LightWave3D package there. We hope to become the Photoshop of the 3D world at least that's where we are headed. We do want to open it up to questions because we know you have a lot of things you want to ask about. We are going to be a little bit quiet about features. We've always been pretty open about those things.
We are going to have a new version coming out in 96, but that's as specific as I'm going to be except to say our new mode of operations is to start working in the direction that "the animator is never blind," a quotation from Jason. Which means interactivity, intractivity, intractivity. You are already seeing steps in that direction with the realtime shaded preview. Any tool you can use on a panel you should be able to see the result nearly instantaneously. So that truly we move to a what you see is what you get environment. Rendering speeds will come with faster computers. The only way to speed up anima tion is to speed up the way you create your animations. To make things more and more interactive is the way to do that. With that said raise those hands.
Audience :Is your ultimate goal to compete with Alias and the big boys?
Brad: We are already competing with Alias. A lot of people find that a hard pill to swallow especially at our price point. We are converting seats all the time. I don't want to stand up here and say we are trying to kill any other package. That is not our goal. I would be really happy if there were an animator using Alias who occasionally reached over and used Modeler or Metaform. We are trying to increase compatibility. That is another important point for the future of things, packages have to become more and more compatible. One step we have taken is having object translators for Wave front, DXF and 3DS models. Those are three fairly standard formats that most other packages will load so our geometry is compatible. We have licensed HIIP technology from Elastic Reality. There is some Plug-in implementation written by Arnie again that allows you to load and save in multiple image formats Pict, Targa, Wavefront, PCX, etc. so that as you move into an integrated situation you can share files across environments. It's the best tool for the job, but we want you to be using LightWave too. We want to be comparable and to compete.
Audience: Will reflections on glass be improved in LightWave?
Brad: We are looking to make improvements to the Renderer in many ways. There is a saying with time comes features. With Plug-in architecture it is possible to actually replace the rendering system. Steve has done some fantastic things. He is pretty much doing his own rendering completely outside of LightWave.
Allen: It is possible to create extremely realistic glass with proper reflections and refractions.
Audience: I'm talking about in an animation where over time the reflections don't keep up with the frames.
Allen: That might have something to do with the specifics of the scene. I can't really say without examining it. In the case of the shot glass, I was able to match the reflections with the physical glass sitting in front of me.
Audience: You mentioned VRML, what about support for Java?
Brad: I don't think Java is a real time 3D operating system. I think Java is a lot like Multimedia a catch all. If anyone can provide a definition? Audience: Executable content. Brad: Use of programs across platforms. Without having to recompile the program for other platforms. That is outside the context of what LightWave is being written to do.
Audience: What about natural phenomenon and organic stuff?
Brad: The next revision, we will be focusing heavily on organic modeling and character tools. That's why we brought Fori in. His background is in organic modeling. We are always looking at highend things like hair and ways to overcome those things.
Allen: Organic effects are a great example of where Plug-ins come into play. It's possible to replace our LightWave renderer with your own volumetric renderer or one that accounts for various effects not available in LightWave. I think you will be surprised by the range of effects that will be possible with the architecture as it is in 4.0.
Brad: Plug-ins is a way you are going to see more and more features put into LightWave more quickly. Because we wont have to do everything anymore. We like to make LightWave have everything built into it, and we've done a fantastic job doing that. I recently got hold of the 3DStudio's IPAS listing book written by Tim Vorhees, a very nice book. I remember thinking this is like espionage I can call Arnie and say hey look at page 4 through 60 and make all these Plug-ins. Boy was I surprised to find that these were already included as built-in features or already Plug-ins available with LightWave. It's not to say that there isn't a lot of room for improvement and new features. There have already been a number of Plug-ins come out, and obviously we've got XAOS tools working on a number of things. Unlimited Potential has released its new wave filter and an image filter, Lock and Key amendments, FiberFactory, Macroform. A lot of guys I see here at the show. Plug-in architecture has only been readily available for two months and look at what has been done already. I know these guys are just champing at the bit for cool new ideas. So you should get into the show floor and talk with as many developers as possible. All these things are coming out rapidly but these guys are starving to know what you want. Every effort has been made to be as accurate as possible. Please forgive any omissions. Some comments spoken off mic may have been unintelligible as this was being transcribed.
Stuart: On the question of Organic modeling, we already have some very definite plans for some very specific tools which are going to make organic modeling like falling off a log. That will be coming out as a built-in thing or maybe as a Plug-in first to speed up getting it out there.
Brad: The tools he is talking about will result in a quantum shift as significant as Metaform. We have quite a few leaps of that order of magnitude coming in these new tools.
Audience: Will we see Splines or Nurbs in LightWave?
Brad: We will never see Nurbs in LightWave. Didn't you read that article? (Laughter) We'll have to remove one of those letters, NUBS or URBS. You might see NUBS. Stuart wrote a real good article in LightWavePro about them. What people really want is splines with control points. You will even truly see them. Audience: You said that you really wanted to take LightWave into a Game developers package. What steps have you taken to make this happen?
Brad: Jason and I visited Origins in Austin, Texas at the Worldwide Game Developers conference. Alias was there as well with a very impressive Game developers pack that allowed you to move, size, shear polygons. Being a Nurbs based Modeler system their Games pack is basically our Modeler features. We're working with several game developers to create new tools for them that will be released as a package or as Plug-ins. We are taking a pretty active marketing approach to those companies. Going out and making personal visits at key locations and doing demonstrations showing them the way. The fact that our object format supports Ngons sup porting 65,000 point polygons blows them away. Showing them Metaform and explaining to them why polygon reduction is a backward way of think ing. Instead by starting with a simple object and letting the computer add complexity. Rather than make something complex and have the computer reduce it. Polygon reduction is a good idea and we have certainly taken steps in that direction, but if you can shift your idea of modeling to a Metaform way of thinking. You make a cage and that is your real-time object with low polygon count. Then you Metaform that a level or two and get a higher resolution object which you use to create you animations. That has generally been well received.
Audience: What about incorporating Quicktime VR for Modeler?
Allen: That's again something for Plug-ins. I recently wrote one as an experiment which produced as an output a single image which contained a 360 degree view around the camera including straight down and straight up. It was basically a spherical projection. It was fairly simple and it might be something I would consider releasing, basically that's what QuicktimeVR is.
Audience: When will VRML be available?
Brad: VRML, we can already do that. You simply click on the save VRML button and save the object out in VRML format.
Audience: I've done that but my object tends to breakup into particles.
Arnie: Could be a bug.
Audience: Could be a feature. (Laughter)
Brad: Yeah the autodefrag feature! (Laughter)
Audience: How about OpenGL how will you be supporting it?
Brad: Any card that supports OpenGL will be supported by our OpenGL previewer. We are taking steps to make LightWave and Modeler more inter active faster redraws, solid views.
Audience: What steps are we taking with Bones for 3D character animations? Brad: In 4.0 there have already been some major advances allowing you to define minimum and maximum influences range falloff. If you use that appropriately, Jason has some pretty cool demonstrations of that. The M&Ms are a great example of the use of Bones for articulated motions. We are making some more improvements to Bones.
Audience: What about the use of LightWave in architectural modeling?
Brad: DXF objects can load into Modeler and save out as LightWave objects. They can then be manipulated into complex models and scene files for flythroughs. This is another market we are looking at seriously.
Audience: Are you looking into utilizing dual processor machines?
Brad: I have a dual Pentium machine outfitted with ScreamerNet which acts as a self contained render farm and each processor can be assigned separate desks. Audience: Will LightWave ever be ported to the PowerPC?
Brad: We are always looking for new and better platforms.
Audience: Are you deliberately being Vague?
Brad: Yes, I am deliberately being vague. NewTek has been notorious for preannouncing things. The LightWave group is going to make a real hard push not to talk about things. We are going to hold off announcing things until the manuals are already out at the printers and we can say release is within the next 30 days instead of the common "it's shipping in 2 weeks." (Laughter and applause) You can hate me now for not telling you, but leave me later for not disappointing you.
Audience: There have been rumors that you will be coming out with a version of LightWave with features only for the SGI?
Brad: That is not correct all versions of LightWave will be the same across all platforms. The only differences in features maybe in Plug-ins. I can't force XAOS or any other 3rd party developers to write Pennello or some thing for the Amiga or any other system. We are committed to keeping all the systems identical. You are a LightWave animator it doesn't matter what machine you are working on today or tomorrow. You'll always feel comfortable that all the systems are compatible and we are very committed to that.
Audience: What about the alliance between Deskstation Technology and NewTek?
Brad: It's a joint venture it allows us to do hardware testing and to maximize LightWave for the DEC Alpha processor not better than any other platform. It provides us with feedback for the OpenGL card. What card is going to be the best. We have future plans beyond LightWave with Deskstation Technologies and this will help us to grow. Alliances are good because they al low companies to grow without adding overhead.
Audience: Several companies have discussed offering time on supercomputers for rendering will LightWave support this?
Brad: Do they run under Windows NT? I will get you some information about this later. We are always looking for new and better platforms. Put 10 Alphas on a ScreamerNet and that equals 400 Amigas. That's a supercomputer!
Audience: With Plug-ins is NT the platform of choice?
Brad: Well there are more developers working on the NT platform, and more units have been sold running on NT. However a lot of developers prefer to stay on the Amiga. We have others who do both. We are not depending completely on outside developers or Plug-ins. One of the major advantages we have had over 3DStudio who has great success with their Plug-in developers is that our major core features are integrated into the program that makes them a lot less clumsy to work with. We will continue that with Inverse Kinematics, Bones, and other core components that are built into the software. Some of the more niche things will be developed as Plug-ins. Is NT the platform of choice? The market will ultimately determine that we won't.
Allen: Let me say, this we have done great pains to make the Plug-in architecture function the same across platforms, and to strongly encourage developers to support as many different platforms as is possible.
Brad: Our developers program is structured such that there are benefits to buying all five versions of LightWave, and Arnie is proactively looking for ways to help developers with the toolkit as well as ways for them to go to a porting lab and test their ideas on other platforms, especially due to the cost of SGI machines.
Audience: Is there anything being done so that we can highlight a specific surface for modification? Sometimes when I get a model I have no way of knowing what the original modeler has named the surface and it is very time consuming to go hunting for it.
Brad: Noted, Thank you.
Audience: I like the preview feature of the spheres in Layout and it would be nice if you could double click on it and have it highlight points.
Brad: I'd like that too. I'd also like render sample cow. (Laughter) No you're exactly right and that is the direction we are heading.
Audience: Will there be world coordinates applied to Bones to aid in defining hierarchies?
Brad: You're referring to gimbal lock?
Audience: Yes!
Brad: There are other ways to avoid gimbal lock. With world coordinates I believe you would lose the ability to put in absolute values.
Allen: There are a number of options for manipulating objects in Layout that I am exploring.
Audience: I have heard there is someone working on a Metaball Plug-in.
Brad: That would be very cool.
Audience: Considering the future planned migration to the MIPS chip will you continue to support this version (Amiga)?
Brad: As long as there continue to be (68000) Amigas there we will continue to support them.
Audience: Why the big delays between Platform versions of the new software?
Brad: There are many reasons for the different platform versions coming out at different times. It is basically that you have to prioritize in order to get things done with the number of people you have available to work on a project. MIPS is third in line.
Allen: For the core program because it runs under NT, it is only a matter of minutes to recompile it to run under MIPS.
Audience: When working in the surfaces Panel it would be nice if you could click on number of different surfaces for modifying without having to leave the panel repeatedly.
Allen: That is exactly the type of refinements that I am working on to minimize the number of mouse clicks.
Stuart: It's now possible for each Plug-in to load its own texture or bumpmap or series of textures and to apply, combine them, cross fade, blend, etc. So we really have already addressed that in this new version it's just a small question of tweaking the LightWave interface to better reflect that feature.
Allen: I should point out that it is possible to use Plug-ins on top of Plug-ins to make multiple combinations so there is not limit to the number of textures available.
Audience: You've talked about the importance of compatibility of programs what other kinds of standardization are you planning?
Allen: Well we are not going to standardize based on Windows, because we are programing for multiple platforms we can standardize to industry standards to make it more industry-like. The big thing is interactivity and people like our interface so we are not going to destroy that but improve upon it.
Audience: Will Modeler ever merge with Layout?
Brad: They will become more closely integrated but that is all I can say at this point.
Audience: Version 2 to 3 was a huge jump, 3 to 3.5 wasn't, now version 4? Brad: I agree from a surface standpoint, but looking internally a great deal has changed. Now the program runs on five different platforms and independent of the Toaster. Now you can run it on a laptop. It is a quantum change it just isn't an in your face change, it's not different colors or rounded buttons, but it is a major change. Remember you're looking at the two guys who did everything the expansion of the team is recent.
Allen: Now that we have portability, we have Plug-in architecture, well I guess that is all I can say. (Laughter)
Brad: With Plug-in architecture new features are moments away not months. There are new features being completed that I didn't even know we had started on yet. They have laid the ground work is the major over haul, and now we will build on it.
Audience: Will Freeform be integrated into LightWave?
Brad: It will be in future releases, LightWave 96, just kidding. (Laughter)
Audience: How about motion capture readers for LightWave?
Brad: Blue Sky has developed a process for translating motion capture into LightWave using a conversion of DXF files. Actually at least three companies are working on it. If you go to our booth we have Flyer clips of motion captured data from Blue Sky. Real live captured stuff brought into Lightwave, pretty cool.
Audience: How about realtime 3D painting?
Brad: Positron has an 3DStudio's paint program called Meshpaint which they are converting to run under Windows NT for LightWave.
Audience: When will we get the Amiga version of LightWave?
Brad: The Amiga version of LightWave is in final testing and 4.1 Toaster will ship with 4.0 LightWave. The Amiga version required quite a bit of additional features and took a little longer, but that is all done now.
Audience: What about compatibility with third party display boards?
Stuart: That's also done now, Layout always worked fairly well, Modeler was the problem and was cutting out, but that has been resolved and works with the Plug-in architecture. I think that the prerelease version may already have it. The final version there is a screen change button, press it, change screens and you're off and running. Now it works just like the PC version.
Audience: What about the CyberVision board?
Stuart: If the board observes and supports the standard display database it should work. Compatibility is a matter of having hardware and software observe established standardized rules and then everything should work properly. We don't have one of those boards so we haven't been able to check it out.
Audience: I've noticed that some screens on the prerelease version don't run as fast as on 3.5. Will that be corrected on 4.0?
Allen: No, unfortunately we are finding that with the new code the available SAS compiler is not able to run the code as fast as we would like. We were quite surprised by that.
Audience: What about support for Blue screens and Green Screens?
Brad: We don't do that or have plans to do that, but I believe ImageFx and Wave Filters have Blue and Green Screen capability.
Audience: There are memory leaks in the NT 4.0 version of LightWave?
Brad: There is a patch available to correct this available on the NewTek BBS or by random distribution through the Internet.
Audience: What about distributed rendering?
Brad: That's a tough one, we haven't had an acceptable response to that yet, but we are still looking.
Audience: I was wondering about the use and saving of Alpha channels in different formats?
Brad: It is not currently fully supported, you can use HIIP to convert it between formats, but it is not supported as a master file. We will look at that in the future.
Allen: You can save images with the Alpha channel embedded now on an individual basis.
Brad: Plug-ins can integrate anything in Layout. So I wouldn't be surprised to see that relatively soon.
Audience: Is it possible to run LightWave over multiple machines using only one machine with a dongle and render across the farm of ten machines?
Brad: Separate rendering programs can be run without dongles on every machine in a system, by running ScreamerNet with one copy of LightWave with a dongle controlling 9 other machines that can be used to render. TNet will also control Amigas for rendering. ScreamerNet will support crossplatform. Foundation Imaging has a module that controls rendering without LightWave being present as a controlling program. There are basically two files that control the process and a program can be created that will oversee these files and effect the render.
Audience: How far is the PCFlyer from rendering the Flyerclips?
Brad: That will be handled by a Plug-in that was demonstrated at the developer's conference. Not currently commercially available, but we're now determining how it will be distributed. If you call Tech Support they will tell you that we don't officially support crossplatform network rendering because of the differences from machine to machine even within the same platform compounded by mixing platforms. So if you have the DonculatorPC it might not be compatible with the Raptor or Amiga or another brand of PC on the network. Also we can't guarantee that all developers will write for all platforms so there are many opportunities for cross platform incompatibilities.
Audience: Will the new version of LightWave be compatible with the 68060?
Brad: We will have to recompile it with an appropriate compiler to make it native, but you will be able to run it, as is on any 6800 series processor probably with some increase in speed. If there are no other questions will break. Thank you all for coming! (Applause) 
Every effort has been made to be as accurate as possible. Please forgive any omissions. Some comments spoken off mic may have been unintelligible as this was being transcribed.
Thanks!
Marc Halperin
LA Toaster Users Group