Electric Rain Inc. today announced the release of Swift 3D LW, a new plug-in for NewTek’s LightWave 3D software. The plug-in provides the ability to render 3D content directly to various vector-based file formats, including Macromedia Flash, AI, EPS and SVG.
Electric Rain leverages its RAViX II vector rendering technology in the new plug-in, which is available both for Mac OS and Windows. The company claims the plug-in works up to 10 times faster than other 3D-to-vector rendering products on the market. Swift 3D LW supports 3 levels of outlines, 5 levels of cartoon shading, 2 levels of gradient shading, shadows and specular highlights. The plug-in also sports a full previewer window that enables LightWave users to view the results of each rendered frame.
Electric Rain said that Swift 3D LW could handle models containing more than 200,000 polygons, including complex intersecting and self-intersecting objects. The end results are fully optimized files that users don’t need to later process, according to Electric Rain.
Electric Rain said that Swift 3D LW would work on LightWave 3D 6.5 and above. The software carries a suggested retail price of US$295, and can be downloaded and purchased online through the Electric Rain Web site.