LightWork Design Releases LightWorks 7.8

By DE Editors

LightWork Design (Sheffield, UK) released a new version of LightWorks — LightWorks 7.8. Its main focus is to improve the accuracy, performance, and the ease-of-use of lighting, global illumination, tone mapping, and gamma correction making the creation of photorealistic imagery even easier.

A few key developments include a new simplified user interface for Global Illumination with new controllers that make Advanced Lighting easier to use and provide improved usability and performance for both experts and non-experts alike. It also speeds up integration within customers' applications so that the finished product is more user friendly and dynamic.

Another development is Final Gather, which has been made more intuitive as the speed/quality tradeoff has been improved. LightWorks includes both diffuse and specular shaders for Final Gather, to allow a wider range of photorealistic effects to be created.

Now LightWorks Real-time Plus has been re-engineered to provide improved performance as well as greater user control. Also, LightWorks Real-time now includes better support for gamma correction so that real-time renders more closely match software renders in terms of color.

In addition to new Shaders, a new LightWorks Output offers a PNG driver enabling PNG image files to be read and output within LightWorks. For more information about LightWorks 7.8, go to LightWork Design.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.