Animation Tools:
General Controls:
* Support fractional frames at make key for IK Booster
* Update Bake-able Match Goal Orientation for IK Booster
* Tool for moving an object on or by an offset distance across the surface of a target mesh.
* A new rotation controller offers quaternion rotations to minimize gimbal lock.
* Tool which modifies a channel based on closest distance between an object and a mesh or other items.
* LightWave's Align to Path command now offers a robust new align-to-path algorithm, unaffected by very slow or no motion. The original Align to Path is still available, and is now renamed to more accurately describe its function, "Align to Velocity."
* Squash and stretch tool
* Motify: Replacement Delete key option. It includes more advanced features, including clearing motions, deleting ranges of keys and deleting keys within a threshold
* Hybrid Inverse/Forward Kinematics engine improving on the industry's most flexible IK system available today
* Free-form and locked IK goals
* Separate animated channels
* Animatable UV coordinates
Particle FX & Dynamics Systems: * Faster Loading of Dynamics Scene Files
* Better Workflow with Access to Dynamics in the Scene Editor
* Improved Solving Precision
* More accurate representation of wind vector fields in Layout
* Animation Paths for Winds
* FXDynamic-Linker links objects to particles with smart routines that reduce memory requirements
* Particles have a new operation control -- random rotation and scale. This is also passed on to HyperVoxels, as noted above.
* Added a "Save All Selected Motions" option
* Soft body dynamics for cloth, hair and other simulations
* Preset cloth settings for quick application of various "materials" such as rubber, silk, cotton, etc.
* Integrated particle system for explosions, fire and smoke, using wind, gravity and collision effectors
* Simple fluid dynamics and crowd simulation with new interparticle collision calculations
* Particle spawning from parent emitters allows a single particle to become a complex emitter
* Collision spawning allows collision events to create new particles with independent attributes
* Effects grouping allows users to isolate particular wind, gravity, collisions and emitters to affect or disregard each other
* Change Group mode for collisions will force particles into a new Effects Group after collision
* Nozzle types (cone, surface, line)
* Texturing of wind power, particle velocity and wind direction
* Particles are generated with such properties as size, weight, resistance, lifetime, vibration and adherence to the motion of the parent item
* Wind types include: direction, explosion, rotation, cylinder-explosion, doughnut, turbulence, vortex, path, sticky, random, hemisphere and drag
* Collision detection with primitives or polygonal and subdivision surface LightWave objects
* Object and scene linking to particles - attach items or complete hierarchies to particles. Perfect for flocking and swarming actions
* Textured and enveloped birth rate for particles, with emission from pre-defined shapes, object vertices, normals and textures
* Rigid Body Dynamics
* Improved Soft Body Dynamics
* Improved Cloth Dynamics
* Bone Dynamics work similar to the other dynamic tools in LightWave 3D v9, but are applied to bones instead of geometry.
* Improved Particle System Tools
