Dear All,
We are pleased to announce a number of changes to PresetCentral.com, including the details of our long promised competition.
Competition
How do I enter?
To enter the competition you simply have to upload one of your own presets to PresetCentral. We started this site because we loved LightWave and the LightWave community. We felt it was therefore most appropriate to pick winners from the many contributors to this website. The more presets you share and contribute the better your chances are. Simple.
Prizes
[ul]
[li]One copy of Newtek Lightwave courtesy of Newtek Europe[/li][li]One copy of the IFW2 plugin (quad license), courtesy of Richard Jennings at Shaders.co.uk[/li][li]One infiniMap Exr & exrTrader bundle, courtesy of db&w[/li][li]Two copies of “Learning Lightwave 9” by Olivier Michon and translated by Ben Vost, courtesy of Elephorm[/li][li]One copy of LWCad 3.0, courtesy of WTools3D[/li][/ul]
How will we pick the winners?
[ul]
[li]Three presets (1st, 2nd and 3rd) will be picked by our panel of judges (Matt Gorner & Ben Vost) for creativity and technical achievement[/li][li]Three further presets will be picked at random, making it possible for novices and beginners to enter the competition[/li][/ul]
The administrators of PresetCentral will contact each winner by email and offer them the choice of one of the above prizes.
Deadline
Presets submitted before 1st March 2009 will qualify for the competition. Any presets submitted after this date will not qualify.
All there is left to say is good luck and we look forward to seeing your submissions!
Improvements to PresetCentral.com
IFW & LWCad - “… but I don’t own IFW or LWCad!!”
Yes a big mistake on our behalf. With all the IFW plugin presets it was impossible to determine which presets did required a 3rd party plugin and which didn’t. You can now go to your profile and choose to exclude presets that use IFW or LWCad from all of PresetCentral.com.
Video Tutorials - lots of you said that you weren’t sure how to import/create presets
Matt Gorner has kindly put together some video tutorials that explain in detail what presets are, how to create them and import them from PresetCentral.com. Furthermore he has also created a video about the Preset Standard Scene. Thanks Matt & shout to Weepul!
Latest Activity - all the exciting comments and changes were hidden
We decided the best way to let you all know what was giong on was to put together an activity list. Now you can see who is registering, who is uploading what and most importantly who is saying what! And if you don’t like it? Fine, just filter out the activities you don’t care about.
Preset Standard Scene - once uploaded you couldn’t add or replace the Preset Standard Scene image
Browse your own presets and use the “Edit” feature next to the preset title. In the “Edit” view you can now add or replace an existing Preset Standard Scene image.
Tagging - You couldn’t add or remove tags once a preset was uploaded
Tags are automatically generated from the preset. Using highly sophisticated (honest!) algorithms we rip out all the nodes and properties and create a list of tags that represent that preset. During the upload process you are invited to add your own “custom” tags. You can now add and remove any tags in the detailed view of any preset. You can only do this on your own presets of course. 
Advertising - Everybody hates Advertising!
Which is exactly why we haven’t added any, but annoyingly running a server isn’t cheap. So we thought the best way to raise a bit of cash was to put an Amazon affiliate link on the frontpage. No pressure, but anything you buy via the link helps us run and build a better PresetCentral.com. We are very grateful any help!
PSPlant - the only LW preset download manager you will eaver need!
WTF I hear you say? Well,… its not like we have been keeping it a secret. Andrew Rowson has been working hard on an awesome preset manager that works directly with PresetCentral.com. This means you lucky Windows users can upload and download presets from your desktop without having to go the website. Better yet, all presets downloaded by PSPlant are automatically added to the right LightWave directory.
Now for the bad news… it is NOT quite ready yet. But once some of us have come back off of holiday work to put the final touches on PSPlant will commence and you will be seeing shortly.
… and
…lots of other smaller bug fixes which we would tell you about, but are mostly embarassing 
… and finally
We built this site for the LightWave community. It’s as good as its members and the presets people share. If something doesn’t work or you find a problem - email us, politely please
The PresetCentral.com Team