News Flash!

FOR RELEASE APRIL 6, 1998

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT Steve Herrmann Director, Marketing (210)370-8000 steve_herrmann@newtek.com

Hollie Wendt Public Relations (408)688-1193 hollie@earthlink.net

LAS VEGAS, National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference, April 6, 1998 - NewTek, manufacturer of industry-leading 3D animation and video production products, today announced LightWave 3D 5.6, an enhanced version of the popular 3D animation software that NewTek is offering as a free upgrade to registered users of LightWave 3D 5.5.

The most significant addition to the 5.6 version is HyperVoxels, NewTek's breakthrough rendering technology for greatly simplifying the creation of organic effects and naturally flowing phenomena, from as viscous fluids to extremely detailed rocky surfaces. In addition to including HyperVoxels in LightWave 3D 5.6, NewTek is also offering it as a free enhancement to users of LightWave 3D 5.5.

"With the free LightWave 3D 5.6 upgrade and free distribution of our new HyperVoxels technology, NewTek is following our usual strategy of looking at what our customers ask for, then giving them a solution that addresses their needs but in a far more elegant and effective fashion," said Brad Peebler, director of graphic software development of NewTek. "Our customers wanted a way to animate MetaBalls, and we have delivered HyperVoxels, which will far exceed their expectations. Compared to MetaBalls, HyperVoxels is much faster and cleaner, and it offers a much higher degree of realism, flexibility and integration to the ray-tracing engine."

HyperVoxels is a sub-pixel volumetric rendering technology that ray traces continuous virtual surfaces that can be perturbed with various hyper-textures, or algorithmic textures that allow for extremely detailed 3D surfaces. HyperVoxels surfaces are integrated with the LightWave 3D 5.6 rendering engine to support ray-traced reflections, refractions and shadows.

HyperVoxels technology provides a geometry-efficient tool for LightWave 3D users, who can more easily render organic effects such as fluids, rocky surfaces, rusted materials, and other worldly phenomena. Previously, animators either avoided these types of effects or used a laborious combination of morph targets, displacement maps and bones that too often missed the mark for the intended effect.

Other Enhancements of LightWave 3D 5.6 In addition to HyperVoxels, LightWave 3D 5.6 offers the following new or improved capabilities:

* New Steamer Shader, which allows LightWave 3D to calculate accurate shadows, refractions and reflections of the volumetric effect; this very complex computation, unique to LightWave 3D, requires excellent integration within a robust ray-tracing engine
* The ability to copy and paste texture attributes from one channel to the next, for rapid matching of different channels
* SkyTracer image wrapping for real-time visualization of generated skies
* Stereoscopic rendering, by automatically generating two images from the appropriate camera vantages
* Natural shaders collection for creating snow, water, and rusted surfaces
* Stereo Composer plug-in, which automatically generates a red/blue-shifted image for use with stereoscopic glasses
* More realistic reflection and refraction through enhancement of the LightWave 3D time-based selective ray-tracing engine
* The ability to adjust the amount of fog assigned to each object
* Support for Direct 3D (Win 95 only)
Support for QuickTime 3.0 (Intel and PowerMac only)
* Support (in the Intel version of LightWave 3D 5.6) for Render GL 3.0, for utilizing OpenGL hardware acceleration to rapidly render images with fog, background images, color gradients, anti-aliasing, edge transparency, reflections, refractions, texture anti-aliasing, spherical reflection maps and more accurate smoothing of surfaces
* Jolt, a motion plug-in that allows items to be key framed to have random tremors based on locations in the scene
* Super Jitter, an extension of the Jitter plug-in that allows the user to animate a random jitter to an object's position, rotation or scale
* The ability for LightWave 3D image filters to process Photoshop filters
* Enhanced threading support
* Alternative motion plug-in architecture, so motion plug-ins can receive inverse kinematics solutions
* Rapid access to the most recently used plug-in interface
* Sky Tracer Doubler, which improves render times and enhances rendering quality through adaptive sampling techniques
* LScript 1.3, the latest and greatest LScript, with many enhancements and speed improvements
* NetRender support plug-in, which allows users to automatically pack up a scene and securely transfer the data to Asset Factory (a division of NewTek), where the scene will be rendered and returned to the user at a reasonable fee
* SDK enhancements (used by third-party developers to simplify the creation of plug-ins): Layout Monitor (progress monitor), Preview Services plug-in and Gradient Services, new color picker global

Price and Availability LightWave 3D 5.6 with HyperVoxels technology, will be available May 15 free of charge to all current owners of LightWave 3D 5.5. LightWave 3D 5.6 runs on Windows NT and Windows 95, DEC Alpha running Windows NT, Power Macintosh, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems. Registered users of LightWave 3D 5.5 can download the upgrade (or HyperVoxels, separately) from the NewTek Web site at www.newtek.com or receive this upgrade on a CD-ROM, for a nominal materials and shipping charge. The physical CD-ROM upgrade includes a new CD-ROM, manuals and third-party marketing materials.

About NewTek With headquarters in San Antonio, NewTek is the leader in providing full-featured video editing and special-effects tools that allow anyone to produce professional video and graphics. The company's products are used worldwide on projects from home video to feature film, including some of the most widely anticipated recent blockbusters, such as Men In Black, Titanic, The Fifth Element and The Jackal. Contact NewTek at 8200 IH-10 West, Suite 900, San Antonio, TX 78230. Phone (210)370-8000. FAX (210)370-8001. http://www.newtek.com.