The LightWorks Real-time product provides customers with an easy way to give their users access to high-quality, interactive, hardware-assisted rendering. Applications that incorporate LightWorks Real-time enable users to:
- Render photorealistic images interactively for easy material manipulation
- Create accurate pre-visualisations of the final software-rendered image
- Access thousands of ready-made Real-time materials in LWA archives
LightWorks Real-time goes beyond direct use of low-level hardware APIs, by producing significantly higher quality images using multi-pass techniques at interactive rates, including real-world light intensities, shadows, self-shadowing, and an unlimited number of lights. Adding LightWorks Real-time to an existing Real-time OpenGL-based framework is very easy. Just 3 function calls for an application that already uses LightWorks and just a few more for an application which does not. LightWorks Real-time can be integrated either as a complete Real-time rendering framework or as a high-quality Real-time procedural shading add-on to the application's own Real-time core rendering framework, to be used during the modelling process.
Features
- LightWorks Real-time brings the power of the LightWorks shading architecture to the new generation of programmable graphics hardware.
- With the recent advancements to graphics processors, eg. the introduction of pixel shading, users can create ever more realistic images. However there are some limitations: the small number of lights that can be supported, the small number of instructions supported in hardware pixel shaders, and the need for developers to make use of this new functionality without becoming rendering experts themselves. LightWorks Real-time brings the power of LightWorks to graphics processors by providing our customers with a cross-platform, cross-hardware solution to integrating hardware-assisted rendering with their applications.
- Applications using the powerful LightWorks shading infrastructure give users the ability to break through the limitations imposed by today's hardware. By being tightly integrated into the LightWorks rendering system, LightWorks Real-time gives users an extremely accurate pre-visualisation of the high quality software renderer, so that they can switch back-and-forth with ease between hardware-assisted and software rendering without having to re-author their scenes.
- As part of the Company's strategic development plan, LightWork Design is working closely with the leading graphics hardware suppliers, e.g. 3Dlabs, ATI and NVIDIA, on the integration of products and shader technology with their hardware, so as to maximize the benefits for customers and their users. At SIGGRAPH, LightWork Design has demonstrated the benefits of LightWorks Real-time:
- The power of the LightWorks shading infrastructure and the LightWorks shader writing tools
- The packaging and distribution inside the LWA format of LightWorks shaders that run on Cg and OpenGL 2.0
- Cg and OpenGL 2.0 shading integrated into LightWorks
- A smooth path for users to switch back-and-forth between hardware and software rendering
- Physically accurate rendering of real-world materials (provided by the LWA format)
- A practical toolkit for the integration of hardware rendering into CAD applications.
- By rendering materials, effects and lighting not supported by low-level hardware APIs, LightWorks Real-time produces significantly higher quality images than can be produced by the direct use of OpenGL or Direct3D.
- Through the use of advanced multi-pass hardware rendering techniques, and by being integrated within the standard high-level LightWorks API, LightWorks Real-time supports a variety of effects and features that are not supported by direct hardware APIs. For example, LightWorks Real-time supports real-world light intensities, shadows and self-shadowing, and an unlimited number of lights.