Image credit:

Guillermo Leal, Evolucion Visual, Garza Garcia, N.L., Mexico

Lightscape is the industry leading application for lighting design and rendering. The first application to incorporate both radiosity and ray tracing technologies with real-world lighting, Lightscape simulates the true physical properties of light and materials capturing lighting effects not normally obtained with conventional rendering systems. These subtle but significant lighting effects such as indirect illumination, soft shadowing and color bleeding, produce images of unsurpassed realism.

New Feature Highlights

Detailed Listing of Lightscape Features

Geometry
Support through .DWG import for AutoCAD ® 2000 and previous versions of AutoCAD. Improved translator plug-ins for better interoperability with 3D Studio VIZ ® and 3D Studio MAX ®. Improved drag-and-drop tools for placing and positioning luminaires and other objects into your scenes. Object and luminaire library support.

View Control
Interactive walk-through of radiosity solution (performance depends upon complexity of model and level of hardware acceleration available). Level of detail control available for maintaining interactive display rates. Interactive camera positioning and focal length control. Background image for perspective alignment.

Materials
Physically-based material properties. Templates for major material classes (i.e., metals, plastics, glass). Texture mapping supports orthographic, cylindrical, spherical projections and UV coordinates. Procedural bump mapping and intensity mapping. User-definable material library support. Improved interface for previewing materials.

Lighting
Physically-based lighting properties include color and luminous intensity distributions. Interactive 3D photometric Web editor to inspect and define luminous intensity distributions. Supports IES, CIBSE, and LTLI photometric formats; data for specific luminaires can be obtained directly from manufacturers. Sunlight and skyline controlled by specifying location, date, time and dregree of cloud cover or by direct specification of sun angles. Lighting analysis tools include point and average illuminance and luminance for both surfaces and workplanes. Isolux (color or gray scale) or point-by-point numeric output supported.

Animation
Professional keyframing control for camera animation. Spline-based camera and target path specification. Spline-based acceleration and velocity control. Interactive previewing.

Rendering
Radiosity renderer calculates direct and diffuse indirect illumination. Progressive refinement radiosity technology produces quick visual results that improve incrementally over time. At any point in the processing, user can alter the surface materials or lighting characteristics—radiosity processing rapidly updates the results. Radiosity results stored as integral part of the 3D model, accelerating rendering in animated scenes. Radiosity solution can be rapidly displayed from any viewpoint; Lightscape takes full advantage of an OpenGL compliant 3D graphics acceleration hardware, if present. Radiosity results can be automatically converted to texture maps to reduce model complexity and improve real-time display speed. Ray tracing can be used to add specular reflections and highlights to a specific image—ray tracer makes use of the direct and indirect illumination radiosity calculations for increased image quality and rendering performance. Software and hardware-assisted anti-aliasing. Batch radiosity and ray tracing renderers provided. Network rendering utility, LSnet, lets you schedule and distribute large rendering jobs. For more information on LSnet click here.

Output
24-bit or 48-bit image output to any resolution. 8-bit alpha channel for image compositing. Field rendering for animation frames. 360-degree panoramic image generation for QuickTimeVR, RealSpace or similar applications. 3D radiosity solution can be exported to 3D Studio MAX, 3D Studio VIZ and VRML formats. Freely distributable viewing application included for sharing native Lightscape solutions with others.

Image Formats
Supports .TIF, .TGA, .EPS, .BMP, .JPG, .PNG, RGB or RGBA images.

System Requirements