XDepth® the compatible high-depth image format available for LightWave 3D® free of charge.

[aurora]

(Mar. 27, 2008) - Trellis Management Co. Ltd. announces XDepth HDR for NewTek LightWave 3D.

XDepth is a revolutionary digital imaging technology bringing High-Depth and High Dynamic Range features to the popular Jpeg format.

One month after the wide success of the XDepth plugin for Adobe® Photoshop®, XDepth now appears in the realm of 3D animation and visual effects.

XDepth HDR for LightWave 3D is the world's first High Dynamic Range image compression solution for 3D animation and visual effects, allowing storage of high quality HDR images at a fraction of the space normally required while maintaining full compatibility with the Jpeg format.

VFX production studios , professional artists and animators using LightWave 3D will now be able to output storage-intensive HDR sequences, transfer large amounts of HDR images over the network and extensively employ high-resolution HDR textures for rendering with all the additional benefits of a compressed image format like Jpeg.

XDepth technology also allows 3D applications to keep HDR textures compressed in memory, by means of custom implementations, thus drastically reducing RAM usage for HDR-intensive scenes.

XDepth HDR for LightWave 3D is available to download free of charge for Windows users at www.xdepth.com.

Interested parties can contact XDepth engineers for custom implementations through our contact page at: www.xdepth.com/contact.php .

About Trellis Management:
Trellis Management is a privately held company focused on technology IP's licensing, acquisition and sale. Trellis Management is not related nor affiliated with the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG).

[geo_n]

I tried it. Its great my 997kb hdr file was compressed to a 74kb xdepth jpeg file with all the data intact. Cool info!

[KiDCoDEa]

awesome, tx for info

[xdepth]

Hi all!
Just in case you missed the Newtek forum thread, here are some updates:

Always as a free download at www.xdepth.com :

- XDepth for (Intel) LightWave 3D 64bit released

New XDepth HDR Build version (32bit/64bit):

- Fixed the crash bug, when attempting to load some kind of jpegs.
- LightWave's jpeg loader has been bypassed - even because it looks a bit outdated. So now all the jpeg loading is handled by XDepth.
- Thanks to the jpeg bypassing, loading should be faster and LightWave now properly loads 32bit/pixel CMYK jpegs, a quite rare standard jpeg format but that yelds a higher quality compared to RGB 24bit jpegs.

About CMYK jpegs, consider that LightWave does not handle color profiles - which are needed to correctly "convert" CMYK to RGB. So you should expect a different "color" scheme compared to, say, Photoshop's CMYK.
Although, with LightWave's native jpeg loader, CMYK jpegs were completely unsupported, and LightWave tried to load those images as 8bit grayscale...which resulted in wrong "scanlines" and ultimately in a corrupted image.

[Gerardo]

Hello Carl,

Thank you for so useful format!

Just remember Lightwave can handle color profiles through the SG_CCTools:

http://www.spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=22039

Though CMYK/RGB conversions need a special treatment, it's possible Hope to see this functionality simplified for the next release.

Thanks for this update, JPGs loading is indeed faster



Gerardo

[xdepth]

Hi Gerardo,
thanks for the info.

I don't think we can use another plugin for that purpose.
Color profile management should be included in the LightWave's SDK for us to be used properly - into our own plugin.

Glad to hear the latest version of XDepth works better.

[Gerardo]

Oh no, I was not referring to Xdepth when I said Hope to see this functionality simplified for the next release. I was referring to SG_CCTools. I've tried here a CMYK JPG (thanks to Xdepth) with SG_CCTools and the conversion is indeed possible

Thank you very much!



Gerardo

[xdepth]

Oh no, I was not referring to Xdepth when I said Hope to see this functionality simplified for the next release. I was referring to SG_CCTools. I've tried here a CMYK JPG (thanks to Xdepth) with SG_CCTools and the conversion is indeed possible

Thank you very much!

I see, sorry my mistake!
Now I got it, you converted the CMYK loaded with XDepth within LW using SG_CCTools... very cool!

Got to download SGCC then! (and XDepth of course )

[nightwalker]

XDepth HDR for LightWave 3D could be the world's first High Dynamic Range image compression solution for 3D animation....

[Jim M]

Hi Carl,

This is great, any plans for a photoshop plugin for cs4 32bit or 64bit?
I cant test the LW plugin till then.

Many thanks,

Jim M

+ that hdr vid looks amazing

+ Also as a side note, the default installation for LWx64 is C:\Program Files\NewTek\LightWave 3D 9\ not C:\Program Files (x86)\ etc. + I think it would be better if its going to be an installer to install into the plugins folder. Obviously you can just copy the *.p file to somewhere else, then uninstall to keep things tidy, but just thought i would mention it.

[just saw how old this thread was]