Worley Laboratories is dedicated to producing advanced software for 3D rendering. We research new graphic techniques and our most successful ideas are released as new, unique, LightWave plugins.

CONTACT INFO:

Scott Hurley
405 El Camino Real
Suite 121 Menlo Park, CA 94025
650-322-7532
Fax 650-322-8349

Email: hurley@worley.com

Gaffer:
Gaffer is a sophisticated lighting and surface tool which replaces LightWave's shading model. It adds per-surface light falloff, exclusion and boosting. It can add multiple layers of specularity with independent intensity, glossiness, color tinting, and Fresnel falloff. It allows for the "brushed metal" anisotropy effect seen on hair, threads, and stainless steel. New diffuse options include transmission and "roughness" for rock and skin effects. Its high quality area light shadows complement LightWave's. It also allows easy and seamless shadow compositing on background plates.

Bloom:
Bloom Bloom is a tool to produce an effect similar to the one you might see on a chrome car bumper at noon on a sunny day, which has an enormously strong, glaring reflection. Bloom can make strong specular highlights produce a surrounding bright glowing halo around them. This is not a surface effect, but an image-based one; the glow may go past the boundaries of the surface. This ability is especially useful for metals in daylight, which is the most common situation where extremely bright reflections are seen.

Acid:
Acid uses a LightWave object to "paint" attributes onto surfaces. You can move the effecting object and cause trails to be left on your surface. The effectors that apply Acid are not limited to simple spheres. Each effector can be positioned, sized, stretched. Acid can leave a history "trail" behind the effector to leave tire ruts or paint trails. Since the Acid plugin can affect all the surface attributes including bump mapping, you can get a huge range of intense effects. Acid also has a preview of its effects in its interface.

Poke:
Poke makes indentations in an object by using another object as a simple tool. In its simplest use, Poke acts like the "Effector" tool, making a bulge in the shape of a sphere appear in the side of an object. However, Poke's advanced control can automatically add footprints to the ground as a creature walks over it, apply dings from bullets and dents from baseball bats, and form all kinds of different "dent" effects. Poke's original design was to simulate the motion of an object under a "skin" of material, like a rat crawling under a rug.

Blink:
Blink repeats cycled behaviors at random intervals and speeds. It was designed for simple eyeblinks, but actually is much more useful for applications ranging from shutters banging in the wind to an endless steam of insects crawling across a floor.

Parent:
Parent is a fully dynamic tool for parenting any object, light, or bone to any other. You can switch parents at any time to allow "hand-offs" of objects from one character to another. Parent can attach clothes and jewelry to LightWave bones so they stay attached when your character is animated by the bones. Parent has many more features such as divorcing channels (allowing objects that will stay upright even if their parent rotates.) It allows cycled parenting, which allows you to repeat a sequence of parents.

PhaseLink:
PhaseLink allows an object have a complex, scripted, response to some external stimulus. This allows you to control the motion of dozens of gears by the use of a single null, or to make an android's elbow piston react to the angle of its elbow joint.

DistLink:
DistLink DistLink allows vehicles to have complex walk or driving cycles which are automatically followed as the object is moved over the ground. This would allow, for example, a beetle to automatically move each of its legs in a perfect walk cycle as you simply drive the beetle object over the ground.

ThrottleLink:
ThrottleLink allows easy speed control of machinery. A complex device like a steam engine can be controlled with a single simple throttle, as opposed to hand-keyframing the varying speeds of each part of the engine in their complex cycle.

SpeedLink:
SpeedLink SpeedLink allows objects to react to the velocity of other objects. This is useful especially in instrumentation, such as making a working speedometer. Other applications include causing an airplane to bank slightly when it sideslips, or for landing gear to automatically raise when an airplane is moving quickly.

AccelLink:
AccelLink allows objects to react to the acceleration of other objects. This allows car suspensions to automatically rock backwards when they start, and forwards when they stop. It make motorcycles automatically make wheelies, or a character sag against his seatbelt during a sudden stop.

Lens:
Lens can add or remove many real camera lens distortions to your rendered imagery to match background plates. These distortions include shear, offset, scaling, rotation, and pincushion effects. It can also apply the inverse distortion to an image. This lets you take a background plate and remove the distortion from it to get a "flat" version. This allows Lens to distort your rendered imagery to match the background, or to undistort your background to match your rendered imagery. Lens's interface has a real time preview of its effects on your scene.

Wheelie:
Wheelie allows an easy way to automatically have vehicle wheels rotate. It is deliberately designed to be simple to apply, with no fancy math computation or setup required.

SpeedLimit:
Keyframes can make motions that are a little too harsh; your object may move too fast during part of its animation, making its motion look awkward. SpeedLimit limits the velocity of your objects to prevent them from passing that "too fast speed." You can also animate the allowed speed, allowing the object to start at one speed but accelerate to another.

Track:
The Track plugin extends LightWave's simple light and camera "Targeting" ability, allowing targeting for objects and bones as well. It can also track using any of the 6 object axes, not just the single +Z axis LightWave uses. It can restrict rotations axes if necessary. It can add delays to the tracking, which is useful for gun turrets tracking fast targets.

Limiter:
Limiter prevents objects from exceeding different positional constraints such as dropping below ground level, even if your keyframes pass beyond this level. The Limiter plugin can also restrict rotations to lie only within certain angles, or scaling to lie with defined ranges. The limits themselves can be keyframed to allow different limitations at different times.

Dangle:
Dangle makes a LightWave object like a rope or chain automatically "drape" itself between two points. This allows you to quickly and easily make a sailing ship's rigging, tie a horse to a railing, or drape banners from windows. Dangle will automatically adjust the object if its anchor points move, keeping your rope realistically positioned even as your sailing ship rocks or your horse moves its head. This plugin replaces the painful manual method of using long chains of keyframed LightWave bones along the length of your ropes and cables.

Flexor:
Flexor is a displacement tool designed to offer a versatile control for bending rods or beams. Usually bending effects are accomplished with a chain of bones, but the Flexor plugin allows much smoother, faster, and easier control. The amount of bend is controlled by an exterior object (most often a Null object). Flexor is designed to work especially well in conjunction with the Whip plugin, to produce many dynamic "springy" effects.

Diffuse:
Diffuse is a displacement plugin designed to work with clouds of points. It's not for use with models; it's a particle system effect that's designed for large groups of single points. Diffuse takes each particle and simulates a natural random gas diffusion, using what is known as a ``random walk.'' This is very similar to the way silt will diffuse through water.

HSVBoost:
HSVBoost allows you to boost, reduce, or shift a surface color's hue, saturation, or value. These color attributes can be modified based on the angle of the surface to the camera.

Enviro:
Enviro is a plugin designed to build 360 degree maps showing your entire scene from a central viewpoint. This can be useful for making environment maps for later use as reflection maps. It can also be used to make Quicktime VR (QTVR) and Microsoft Surround Video (MSSV) files, which allow a user on a web page to interactively pan around a 360 degree view of a scene. Enviro can produce spherical, cylindrical, or cubical environment maps. It can also produce flat orthographic views of a scene.

VFog:
VFog is a volumetric fog tool for adding a ground layer of mist, or a "vertical fog" to a scene. VFog is extremely fast, taking only seconds to compute. VFog's interface has a real time preview of its effects on your scene.

Rayleigh:
Rayleigh is a simple fog tool that allows each of the RGB channels to have a separate fog falloff distance. This allows bluing of distant objects and is useful for atmospheres and underwater. It has a real time preview of the effect on your scene in its interface.

PathAlign:
The PathAlign tool is a more powerful version of LightWave's Align To Path. It allows you to have any axis aligned, not just +Z. It can also align to acceleration, or any blend of velocity and acceleration. It can crossfade the path alignment with the base keyframed alignment with the strength control.

BladeBlur:
BladeBlur is a surface shader for making blurred propeller blades. It applies transparency to propeller disks, making proper motion-blurred gaps with customizable appearances and automatic rotation and motion blurring.

VelAccel:
VelAccel allows you to keyframe object velocities and accelerations instead of positions, making smooth parabolic arcs easy. It can also be useful to accelerate cars or other vehicles, since keyframing a smooth acceleration is difficult.

Gaffer:
Intel $199.00
DEC Alpha, Sun $299.00
Bloom:
Intel $199.00
DEC Alpha, Sun $299.00
All Others:
Intel $199.00
DEC Alpha $299.00

LightWave 3D

Gaffer & Bloom: Intel, DEC Alpha, Sun
All others: Intel, DEC Alpha

http://www.worley.com