LightWorks Content can take the form of materials - such as Mannington carpets, Benjamin Moore paints and UNS Metals - and also includes lighting, backgrounds and scenery. It increases the power, value and ease-of-use of rendering applications by enabling users to create accurate images using real-world materials, lights, 3D objects and other Content.
LightWork Design is partnering with key manufacturers and institutions to offer digital catalogues of real-world materials and lights, enabling designers to use rendering for specification purposes as well as the traditional design review and presentation. LightWorks customers are able to promote their products as "LWA-Enabled" offering support for material archives available via the LightWorks-User website www.lightworks-user.com. Once an application is LWA-Enabled, you can easily add to the capabilities of your application without needing any compilation or development, which significantly reduces your time-to-market and development costs.
LWA stands for LightWorks Archive - it is a platform-independent and application-independent digital file format specifically designed for the distribution of elements used to accurately represent real world materials within LightWorks-based CAD applications. The beauty of the LWA file format is its ability to wrap up any number of these elements into a single archive file that can then be used in any LightWorks-based application.
The LWA format is a plug-in mechanism which extends the capabilities of LightWorks-based applications. It gives designers and engineers access to these high-quality, real-world materials and other visual elements, for increasing the realism of rendered images and helping them to make accurate design and styling choices. Real-world materials don't just stop at surfaces though. They extend into environment maps, physically-accurate lights, BRDF real-world measurements, all of which can have sizes, costs, supplier information and website details attached to them for storage inside the LWA archive, to aid in design specifications.
The LWA format is the only solution for defining and distributing procedural shaders that render in both high-quality software rendering and interactively on the latest graphics boards. It was designed and created with input from leading content suppliers in the computer graphics market and suppliers of products to the Industrial and AEC markets.
LWA-Enabled applications automatically install LWA Content and plug-in shaders, extending the rendering capabilities of the application without requiring recompilation or upgrade, thereby significantly reducing time-to-market and development costs.
LightWorks uses both image based and procedural (parametric) shaders to describe materials such as plastics, glass, metals, paints, wood, stone, leather, fabrics, surface finishes, etc. Procedural materials produce better quality and performance and offer the end user more flexibility than image based materials.
One of the unique advantages of LWA files is their ability to replicate the real-world in a digital form. The combination of colour patterning, surface reflectance and bump-mapping, along with other key technologies, all tied together inside a single material, not only gives the power to express realism, but the ability to make use of it within an application with a single drag and drop - once loaded, no further editing of the materials is required. Scaling, lighting, bump-maps and surface properties are already attached and set - all that is required is to choose a surface in your scene, and drag and drop the real-world material onto it. It is as simple as that, and the results are stunning.
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