LightWave 3D (LightWave for short) is a cost-effective 3D animation production software for Windows and Mac operating systems, developed by NewTek in 1990. It is widely used in film, television, game, animation, web page, advertising, printing and many other fields. And it is considered to be one of the few heavyweight 3DCG software in the industry that not only has a long history, but also comes with many successful cases.
LightWave is a complete 3D modeling, rendering and animation solution that integrates all kinds of excellent and advanced rendering technologies into one place. Until now, it has become a full-featured and quite mature 3D animation software with various technologies. It comes with a simple operation, is easy to learn and use, and has extremely powerful functions in the aspects of creature modeling and character animation. Besides, its rendering module based on ray tracing, radiosity and other technologies makes its rendering quality almost perfect. With its excellent performance, LightWave has been favored by many film and television special effects production companies and game developers around the world.
LightWave 3D's modeling capabilities are outstanding, its subdivision surface modeling techniques have been among the best in the past, and comes with high modeling efficiency. That's why Digital Domain chose LightWave, rather than other software, to build that very detailed, lifelike supertanker model when making the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic. In addition, its layer-based modeling technique has many similarities to Autodesk Maya. And pretty uniquely, LightWave 3D does animation and modeling in two separate programs, and uses the Hub to build a soft connection between them.
LightWave 3D enjoys a high reputation in the world. It has won several international Emmy Awards for technology, and many popular Hollywood movies widely used its software technologies to complete animation and visual effects. Plus, LightWave 3D is also widely used in TV program, video game, architectural landscape, plane printing & drawing, industrial product design and presentation, as well as many other fields. To some extent, it can be said that LightWave 3D is currently the most powerful animation effect tools module with the maximum depth and breadth of application layer.
Key Features
- Real-time Collaborative LightWave to Unreal Engine
- FBX and New Interchange Bridge
- Shading Model Customization Tools
- OpenVDB Content Creation
- Metamorphic Animated Sculpting/Painting
- Display Scaling
- Bone System Improved for Game Development
- Edge Shader Node
- Patina Node
- Procedural Shader Node
- Image Caching
- New Compositing Buffers
- NVIDIA OptiX Denoising
- Despike
- Physical Sky
- Physical Sunlight
- Enhanced UV and UDIM Mapping Workflow
- Smoothing Groups
- Empty Volume Shape Primitive
- New Tools for Shape Primitives
- Expanded Layout Undo System
- Popup Menus
- Node Graph UI Options
- Online Documentation
- License Server Option
Fan Made Demo Video
System Requirements
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2012, 2013, 2017 Redistributable Packages
- Apple Bonjour
- DirectX 9.0c
Edition Statement
AppNee provides the LightWave 3D multilingual full installers and all versions universal license key files (LICENSE.LWK), as well as universal content for Windows 64-bit and Mac.Installation Notes
for v2019, v2020 on Windows:- Download and install LightWave 3D
- Start program, when you are asked for a license, simply drag & drop a license file onto the window (or you can copy it to the "bin" folder before starting LightWave 3D)
- Restart program
- Done
Prompts
- Unfortunately, we were never able to achieve a successful crack to this software on Windows 8.1 Pro x64. But you can give it a try.
Related Links
- LightWave Official Video Tutorials
- LightWave Online Documentation
- Examples of LightWave work from community
Download URLs
| Version | Download | Size |
| for Windows | ||
| v2020.0.0 |  |
296 MB |
| for Mac | ||
| v2020.0.0 |  |
138 MB |
| Content | ||
| Universal |  |
350 MB |