CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
13 January 2004
Product News
LightWorks Sketch plug-in for form.Z
LightWork Design announced that auto.des.sys Inc, has released a LightWorks Sketch plug-in for the latest version of form.Z. auto.des.sys has been a customer of LightWork Design for many years, successfully integrating LightWorks rendering within its established form.Z product range. The Company has now decided to extend their integrated LightWorks functionality to include sketch rendering.
LightWorks Sketch is a technology that supports rendering at the conceptual design stage and also allows the creation of impressionistic and stylized presentations at any point during the design process. It works directly from the 3D model to give designers the ability to instantly generate non-photorealistic and hand-drawn images that can be re-rendered from any viewpoint, without having to use other tools.
auto.des.sys has implemented LightWorks Sketch as a plug-in to form.Z version 4.0, enabling a variety of expressionistic effects to be applied to a post-process rendering which make the image appear as if it were done by freehand sketching. There are a number of sketch styles available, including cartoon, oil paint, ink print, hatch and hand drawn.
"LightWorks was the first rendering engine to include this type of sketch technology," commented Alexandra Yessios, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at auto.des.sys, Inc. She continued, "It's something our users have long been asking for and so we are pleased to offer it within the latest version of our software. This demonstrates how LightWork Design is continually listening to customers and delivering what their users really want."
"LightWorks Sketch is now being integrated with applications across a wide range of design industries as it allows designers to portray the ambiance of a design without modeling and rendering a complete photorealistic image" said Clive Davies, Partner Program Manager for LightWorks. He continued, "This can be particularly valuable in architectural design, where sketch styles can be used to evaluate different configurations. For instance, early imagery might best be represented by a rough pencil style, but as the design becomes more defined the visualization technique should change accordingly: pencil lines become more precise and paint styles can be chosen to pick up more detail, until eventually the model contains enough information to support full photorealism."
For more details about LightWorks Sketch go to http://www.lightworkdesign.com/lw_products_sketch.htm
auto.des.sys, Inc. was founded in 1989 with the aim of bringing advanced and 3D modeling and CAD capabilities to the personal computers, at an affordable price. The company's flagship product is the form.Z, which is a hybrid solid and surface 3D modeler that combines polygonal with smooth parametric modeling under a single roof, to give the designer the selection between traditional 3D CAD capabilities, organic free form modeling, or both, in the same environment. It is complemented by drafting, photorealistic rendering, radiosity, and animation. It is CAD accurate and yet gives one the choice of brainstorming a project without numerical constraints at the early stages. form.Z can be used for both conceptual and finished design, as well as visualization. With its extensive editing capabilities, the physical forms a user generates with the program can be manipulated and changed, making it an ideal tool for three dimensional design. NURBS, Bezier/Coon patches, analytic primitives, polygonal and soft objects, and even metaballs can be separate representations or may coexist on the same object, giving the user unlimited control over the creative process. Once a satisfactory form has been derived, form.Z's double precision accuracy can be used to refine the design to full structural detail for 3D visualization, for the production of 2D construction drawings, or even rapid prototyping. Its flexible Lightworks rendering engine allows a user to produce highly photorealistic images, accurate simulations of lighting derived by radiosity procedures, or sketchy expressionistic images.
LightWork Design is a supplier of rendering solutions for developers of advanced 3D computer graphics software. LightWorks is embedded in over 80 software applications and used by more than 1 million users worldwide. Applications that incorporate LightWorks include: Alibre Design from Alibre, ArchiTrend from Fukui Computer, Pro/CONCEPT, Pro/DESKTOP and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire from PTC, Cobalt from Ashlar, Configura and InstantPlanner from Configura Sverige AB, DigiD from Nihon Unisys, form.Z from auto.des.sys, ICEM Surf from ICEM, IX Design from ImpactXoft, Madric from CPU, MSC.visualNastran from MSC Software, NX from UGS PLM Solutions, Presenter 3D from Digital Immersion, PowerShape from Delcam, solidThinking from Gestel, ThinkReal from Think3, trueSpace from Caligari, VectorWorks from Nemetschek NA and products from many other major CAD vendors.
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