LightWave 3D came free in the box with NewTek’s Video Toaster, and for its first four years it would not run without one. That bundle put a serious 3D animation package on thousands of American desks, and within three years Toaster-equipped Amigas running LightWave were making the space battles of Babylon 5 for network television. Its authors, Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson, had been writing Amiga 3D software since the mid-1980s, and the program they built at NewTek is still on sale today.
Fast facts
- Authors: Allen Hastings (the renderer and animation program) and Stuart Ferguson (LightWave Modeler).
- Publisher: NewTek, Topeka, Kansas.
- First release: autumn 1990, bundled with the Video Toaster on the Amiga 2000.
- Sold on its own: from late 1994, as LightWave 3D 3.5 for any suitably equipped Amiga, PAL or NTSC.
- Other platforms: announced for Windows, Windows NT and Silicon Graphics machines in late 1994.
- Famous for: Babylon 5 (Foundation Imaging) and seaQuest DSV (Amblin Imaging).
Before LightWave: Videoscape 3D
In November 1986, at the awards banquet of the Second Amiga Developer’s Conference, Allen Hastings showed two short films rendered on an Amiga and filmed a frame at a time with a 16mm camera. AmigaWorld reported that the realistic 3D animation “electrified the crowd”. Hastings was then a graphics programmer at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California. His renderer became Videoscape 3D, published by Aegis in 1987 at $199.95. Amazing Computing noted that it did its sums in floating point where most animation packages used integers, and still managed one or two seconds a frame.
Videoscape had a weak point, and AmigaWorld named it: objects were built by typing lists of coordinates into a text editor. Stuart Ferguson’s Modeler gave it a proper object editor. By October 1990, according to INFO, the pair were unhappy with Aegis over royalty cheques and had “walked to Kansas to work on Toaster-based 3D products for NewTek”. At AmiEXPO in New York in March 1989 Hastings had already shown a videotape of his new “fast non-ray-tracing renderer with lots of advanced texture options”.
The program in the Toaster box
AmigaWorld’s Toaster review in October 1990 described two programs: LightWave 3D for rendering and animation, and LightWave Modeler for building objects. The reviewer, who said he had used “just about every 3-D rendering package on the Amiga market”, wrote that “LightWave absolutely blows away everything else in its class”.
LightWave was not a ray tracer. It drew most images with Phong shading, which smooths the light across curved surfaces and is much faster, and saved ray tracing for its most realistic shadow mode. The scene editor showed the whole scene in one wireframe perspective window that moved in real time with the mouse. Animation worked by key frames: the user posed the scene at chosen frames and LightWave filled in the frames between. Images could be wrapped round objects in planar, spherical or cylindrical projections, and surfaces could be given bump maps, reflection maps and fractal noise.
Because the Toaster was NTSC only, LightWave was out of reach for most European Amiga owners. At the end of 1993 a company called Warm & Fuzzy Logic showed LightRave, a $499 dongle and program that fooled an Amiga into thinking a Toaster was fitted so that LightWave would run. In 1994 NewTek released LightWave 3D 3.5 on its own, protected by a dongle. Gary Whiteley, who reviewed it for Amiga Shopper, had been “advocating a standalone LightWave for a couple of years”. He guessed that NewTek had acted because it was “incensed by the release of the rival LightRave”, and summed up the result as “available, in PAL and possibly overpriced, but certainly over here”.
Babylon 5 and seaQuest DSV
Foundation Imaging was set up in 1992 by the visual effects director Ron Thornton and Paul Beigle-Bryant after Warner Bros. gave Babylon 5 the green light. Thornton had started using the Toaster in 1990, making pictures for the musician Todd Rundgren, and that had put him in touch with Hastings. He told Amazing Computing that Hastings “has put in nearly everything we asked for”. Foundation’s approach was to link a network of ordinary Amiga 2000s to render the show’s space scenes: Amiga Format counted twelve of them, each fitted with a Toaster.
Thornton’s case for it was about cost and time. Building the show’s space station as a physical model, he said, would have needed “a crew of six working six weeks, plus materials”; instead he built it in the computer himself in two weeks. The magazine set Foundation’s work against the $15 million Cray X-MP supercomputer that had rendered The Last Starfighter in 1984. Beigle-Bryant warned that the comparison was “apples and oranges”, but argued that the desktop tools were better and cost “a fraction of the price”. Thornton estimated the pilot’s 80 effects shots at about a quarter of the cost of doing the same work with models, as Star Trek: The Next Generation did. The pilot premiered on 22 February 1993, and the historian Jimmy Maher gives its whole visual effects budget as $250,000.
Universal’s Amblin Imaging made seaQuest DSV the same way on a larger scale. AmigaWorld reported in November 1993 that it had more than 60 Amigas in a rendering network and that “No miniature models are used”. By September 1994, Amiga Shopper reported, Amblin was also working on Star Trek: Voyager. One of its animators, John Gross, told the magazine he had got interested after watching Hastings demonstrate LightWave at the Chicago AmiEXPO in 1989.
In January 1995 Foundation Imaging’s animator Mojo Seffa started a 3D tutorial series in Amiga Shopper, “The Three Ds of 3D”, billed by the magazine as the work of “the people behind the graphics for the TV program Babylon 5”. The first part showed readers how to build one of the show’s cargo pods in LightWave. Seffa credited LightWave with effects in Babylon 5, seaQuest DSV, RoboCop: The Series “and even a few bits in Star Trek”, and called it “by far, the easiest of 3D programs to learn”.
Not every Amiga effect was LightWave
The Amiga press of the time credited several famous effects to other programs. The morphing “evil leapers” of Quantum Leap, who changed from old to young and from man to woman, were made by the Hollywood post-production house The Post Group with ASDG’s MorphPlus, according to AmigaWorld’s November 1993 report. The Post Group also used MorphPlus for the morphs in the horror film Warlock: The Armageddon (1993). Some later accounts attribute these effects to the Toaster, but the period reports name MorphPlus.
Later history
NewTek announced LightWave 4.0 for Windows, Windows NT and Silicon Graphics workstations in late 1994, alongside the Amiga version, and Foundation Imaging moved from Amigas to PCs in 1995. By 1997 an American dealer’s advertisement for LightWave 5.0 listed The X-Files, Hercules, Xena: Warrior Princess and The Simpsons among the productions using it.
In 2001 NewTek’s management and the LightWave engineers disagreed over rewriting the program. Brad Peebler left NewTek to found Luxology, and Hastings and Ferguson joined him there to write the 3D package modo. NewTek kept developing LightWave, and after a change of ownership a new company, LightWave Digital, released LightWave 2023 in November 2023.
Sources
- AmigaWorld: January 1988, pp. 33–42, Sheldon Leemon, “Depth-Defying 3-D Programs for the Amiga” (Hastings’s 1986 films, Videoscape’s text-file object editing, Aegis price $199.95); October 1990, pp. 22–25, “The AW Video Toaster Exclusive” (LightWave and LightWave Modeler, Phong shading, key frames, “absolutely blows away everything else in its class”); November 1993, pp. 40–46, “Amigas in Hollywood” (Amblin Imaging; The Post Group, ASDG’s MorphPlus and Quantum Leap; Warlock).
- Amazing Computing: vol. 2 no. 4, April 1987, pp. 24–25 (Videoscape 3D previewed, floating-point rendering); vol. 2 no. 7, July 1987, p. 7 (Hastings at Lockheed); vol. 4 no. 4, April 1989, p. 47 (AmiEXPO New York, 3–5 March 1989: Hastings’s new renderer); vol. 5 no. 12, December 1990, p. 62 (the Toaster shipped in September 1990); vol. 8 no. 3, March 1993, p. 73, Les Paul Robley, “Toasty EFX for Babylon 5” (Foundation Imaging, Thornton and Beigle-Bryant, the space station, the Cray comparison, 80 shots); vol. 9 no. 11, November 1994, p. 62 (LightWave 4.0 for Windows, Windows NT and SGI); vol. 12 no. 6, June 1997 (dealer advertisement listing productions).
- INFO issue 33, October 1990, p. 43: Hastings and Ferguson leave Aegis for NewTek.
- Amiga Format issue 48, July 1993: twelve Toaster-equipped Amiga 2000s at Foundation Imaging.
- Amiga Shopper: issue 39, July 1994 (standalone LightWave announced at $699); issue 41, September 1994, p. 34, R. Shamms Mortier interviews Amblin Imaging (Star Trek: Voyager, John Gross); issue 33, January 1994 (LightRave shown at the World of Commodore show in Pasadena, US$499); issue 43, November 1994, pp. 10–11, Gary Whiteley’s review of standalone LightWave 3D 3.5 (LightRave, price, dongle); issue 45, January 1995, pp. 28–29, Mojo Seffa, “The Three Ds of 3D”, part one.
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), chapter 5, pp. 135–136: Babylon 5’s premiere date and $250,000 effects budget, Foundation Imaging’s move to PCs.
- Wikipedia, “LightWave 3D” and “Modo (software)” (web, secondary): the 2001 split and Luxology; LightWave Digital and LightWave 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modo_(software)