The venerable Lightwave is now back, newly led by a team of veterans from the NewTek years. They’ve released a new version for Windows. Lightwave 2023 adds plugins for GPU-accelerated fluid turbulence (smoke, fire etc), a 3D sculpting plugin, and it can now use ‘instancing’ for quickly populating a 3D scene. Including a new Vue-style ‘paint the instancing onto the scene’ brush designed to work with things like “rocks or vegetation”. Plus an integrated OctaneRender, and it sounds like you might even be able to use this for free on a single GPU(?).
