How about relief mapping in PIM? If it isn’t there already, how about adding it in the final or later versions? Would be cool to have a shader for LW too so it would show up in renders also. Some technical babble about relief mapping so you could get hang of what I’m talking about:
Cool lightwave plugin/previewer !
WilliamVaughan
#262
I posted a 30 meg version of teh demo movie on NewTek FTP…for those interested:
ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/Pim/pimdemo.avi
longorshort
#263
William,
That’s great…
no more worrying about trying to describe to others what was in the movie! 
Appreciate the support from newtek!
walfridson
#265
This is way bigger than Fprime… It’s a bit too good to be true :). Hope it will be for sale soon
Only thing I miss is realtime dynamics. With that this would be even more killer app.
tais
#267
for my next job, i need to do a lot of preview of a lot of polys…
i would like to know when your plugin will be released.
the actual state of your plugin seem good for me.
Don’t you plane to do a betaversion or realease a version1 before add all java power inside?
thank you!
Excepti0n
#269
So, is there any news on PIM? Its awfully quiet in here, but this is such an exciting product!
PetterSundnes
#271
Without handing out any confidential information I can say that having tested PIM over the course of a few months now, it is shaping up nicely and anyone using it will have immense realtime 3d power in their hands.
I have been using Macromedia Director and the ShockWave3D format for about 4-5 years now, as well as contributed in projects involving game/realtime 3D engines such as Torque, and compared to any of those PIM is lightyears ahead in terms of production speed. There is absolutely no exporting involved, as you do all the interactivity inside of LW and any given text editor. You also have the benefit of using totally standard JavaScripting instead of a proprietary language that many of the 3d engines are using.
There are ofcourse some issues you have to think of when using PIM too, such as bone animated models have to use weightmaps, and materials has to be set up with realtime in mind. That said, alot of the time PIM plays back the models and materials as when hitting F9 or pressing the play button for the timeline.
PIM introduces something that LW itself would benefit from having, SubScenes: multiple timelines in one scene, spanning any count of items, all controllable by a few lines of code. This basically means you can “press play” for seperate models, even though they are all animated in the same timespan inside LW’s own timeline. For those familiar with Flash, its similar to movieclips having their own internal timelines. You can assign models, lights, cameras, surfaces and their envelopes to such a SubScene, and then you can tell PIM to playback the various SubScenes.
Regarding when the release is and undisclosed cool features (there are many yet to be spoken of), thats up to Enki and his team to reveal, but the engine is there, fully working, and I think it is incredible that such a small team can have come up with something this good. “Bigger” (as in large development teams) 3D engines such as ShockWave3D, Torque, and even AAA games engines doesnt have this level of integration with any 3D application. I just hope i dont get un-employed when it is released… realtime 3d to the masses
Right now its a matter of getting every aspect of it release ready, which we all will benefit from, regardless of the time it will take.
PetterSundnes
#272
Let me put it this way, if it is possible to create as a pr pixel OpenGL shader, its possible in PIM Now look around for “Next-Gen” realtime 3D engines and see what they claim to be able to do visually, its all down to per pixel shaders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLSL
http://www.typhoonlabs.com/
These are DirectX shaders, but completely doable in OpenGL too:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/fx_composer_shaders.html
richcz3
#274
Between PIM and the Beyond Virtualgame enine (uses native LWO and LWS), Lightwave users really have allot to work with now and look forward to. It’s been a loooooong time coming, but gaming and virtual markets are finally coming to Lightwave - Natively :bounce:
duke
#275
As much as I’d love to search through 20 pages - was the price of this ever mentioned? 
It would be great for me for game stuff - I could actually preview normal maps rather than wait till they’re in game or see it in a render (which may not be indicative of what it would look like in directX/openGL).
TrueArt_Support
#277
It's still in building stage I believe, almost every link or clicking on image does not work.. But this "Go Ahead, Make A Game" make me laughing out loud! :D Only true LightWavers will understand this joke..
PetterSundnes
#278
It may help if you view the examples in Internet Explorer on a Windows machine. Other options might be available at a later stage, but at the moment it is only for IE.