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Foundation

Home | LightWorks Products | Foundation

• Foundation
• Advanced Rendering
• Ray-tracing Toolbox
• Advanced Lighting
• Global Illumination
• Main Toolbox
• Architectural Toolbox
• Industrial Toolbox
• Real-time
• Real-time Plus
• Hidden-line
• Sketch
• Special Effects
• Advanced Geometry
• Advanced Output
• 3D Export
• GUI Framework
• Plug-in SDK

The LightWorks Integration Model

Contains all the core functionality required for creating high-quality, competitive rendering applications. LightWorks Foundation also forms the base layer onto which any combination of other products from the product suite can be added.

Features

• An object-oriented API, with an incremental scene description mechanism, giving customers easy, logical and efficient access to the power of LightWorks, so that their applications can meet their users demands.
• Flexibility: because LightWorks has been designed from the start to be closely integrated into CAD and 3D design applications it provides the flexibility that other rendering engines do not. New customers soon realize the value of the elegant design and thought behind the LightWorks API, especially our customers who have moved to using LightWorks after being hindered by the limitations of the rendering engine they previously used.
• Includes the LightWorks Session Manager API - a high-level API that implements all the non-user-interface code required to create advanced, cross-platform rendering applications. Developers creating rendering applications only need to add the top layer of user-interface elements on top of the Session Manager API, significantly reducing the time-to-market (see also the LightWorks GUI Framework product, which implements this GUI layer).
• LightWorks Foundation includes many rendering modes, ranging from wire frame up to high quality, high performing photorealistic rendering with super-sampling anti-aliasing. The 128-bit floating-point renderer provides the maximum power to customers' applications, leading the industry in accuracy. The LightWorks renderer leads the industry in performance with highly efficient multi-threading for maximum throughput.
• Full support is provided for all types of polygonal geometric data, making it very easy to integrate with modeling systems. All geometric properties, like the number of vertices in a polygon, are encoded as full 32-bit integers, allowing virtually unlimited geometric complexity (unlike other renderers which limit the number of vertices to a value that is too small, like 256, and so cannot render the models typically created in today's modeling systems).
• A wide range of other materials can also be created, including texture maps with high-quality MIPMap or Summed-Area-Tables (SAT) anti-aliasing, bump maps, transparency and a range of 5 surface reflectance types: constant, matte, metal, Phong and plastic. Complete flexibility is included for wrapping materials onto 3D surfaces to allow accurate mapping of patterns.
• Soft-edged shadows from an unlimited number of lights is supported, going beyond simple hardware rendering and giving images an increased realism.
• Language independence and Unicode: LightWorks Foundation provides full support for localisation of all user-interface text and messages, and comes with complete localised resources for International-English, US-English and Japanese languages. This significantly reduces the time-to-market for customers creating localised applications.
• Unique to LightWorks is our Interactive Image Regeneration™ (IIRTM) that instantly updates photorealistic rendered views when changes are made to materials, lights, foregrounds or backgrounds. This feature significantly increases the productivity of designers in comparison with using less advanced renderers.
• A range of background and foreground shaders is supplied, giving users the ability to increase the realism of their designs by putting them in context.
• Flexible and comprehensive image format support: LightWorks Foundation comes complete with a range of image format drivers allowing images to be read and written in industry-standard formats like TIFF, JPEG, TARGA and BMP, and also supports the writing of add-on image drivers for customers with their own proprietary formats. Native operating system window drivers are also supplied, allowing LightWorks to be seamlessly integrated with an application's windows, giving users efficient access to high-quality rendering completely within the application.
• LightWorks Foundation includes the functionality for making applications 'LWA-Enabled' - increasing the productivity of end users by giving them access to the large range of pre-defined, industry-specific materials that can be downloaded from the LightWorks-User website.
• The LightWorks plug-in architecture makes it easy to add new functionality to existing LightWorks-based applications without additional development work.
  • all shaders, including lights, are now available as portable (bytecode) plug-ins
  • the new hardware shader mechanism that allows shaders to run on OpenGL 2.0 and Cg is also supported via plug-ins
  • native shader plug-ins are available for Macintosh and Windows