Micro Wave for Mental Ray & LightWave ***

[-Vormav-]

The projector defines the way your scene will be rendered. A variety of custom lenses - orthographic, perspective, panoramic, fisheye can be simulated this way. However, a projector can be anything: a sphere, a car, a teapot, just anything you'll need. Probably the most obvious benefit you'll experience, is rendering a complex scene onto a similar looking - heavily simplified projector object. The complex scene gets literally projected onto the simple object which, as a results, looks similarly complex. The look of the scene is transferred to the projector in form of bitmap textures - an input that every CG application supports.
Wait, so this is pretty much like texture baking, only your baking an object's geometry into a simplified form of the object? Is it based on normal mapping then (the animation I saw looked very normal-mapped)?
(It's sounding a lot like what Z Brush does, only not based on applying the geometry from different subdivision levels in a single model, but instead by using separate objects. Sounds pretty nice, if that's right)

In any case, I think that the whole "regardless of scene complexity" comment is being a little over-zealous.

[brisck1]

Looks and sounds amazing but im still skeptical as they give away NO idea as to how it actually works. It could be a real pain in the arse to use.

[richcz3]

I use Lightwave and almost broke down and bought last year. There is at least one LW user that's a big fan of it who posts often on CGTalk. He works in the games industry where those poly break downs are a real need. Looking at the specification area it is a Normal map solution.

-Vormav- For me, I'll stick with the Zbrush solution as it's not a plugin. I can edit/transform geometry as if painting and I know it will work with with subsequent versions of Lightwave.

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