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January 17, 2011

LightKeys for Lightwave 3D Released!


I'm proud to publicly release the free "LightKeys", an enhanced Navigation and Shortcuts System for Lightwave 3D. It was born out of the need of having similar navigation and item manipulation shortcuts across different 3D applications. As more and more 3D packages and applications adopt the Maya Standard for viewport navigation (Alt+MMB = Pan, Alt+RMB = Zoom), having to switch your mindset to the Lightwave style (Shift+Alt+LMB = Pan, Ctrl+Alt+LMB = Zoom) became a huge hassle for anyone using any other 3D application. To the point that I've seen many Lightwave experts using the navigation icons in the corner of the viewports, probably just to get away from the "navigation disorientation" that results when you try to switch away from the ubiquitous (and highly intuitive, as a matter of fact) Maya navigation standard.

Along the navigation shortcuts change, LightKeys also provides a production-proven shortcuts configuration set with highly increased ergonomy. Basically all the main Lightwave Layout features are accessible from the left side of the keyboard, making the software's operation much more speedy and confortable.

Here's a tutorial video that I've put up to show how to install, configure and utilize it, if you're in doubt if this is for you or not skip to the final 3-4 minutes of the video, where I demonstrate how I use it in production:
Click here to watch it on YouTube (HD)

 Screenshot of the LightKeys Tutorial Video

Apologies in advance for the accent, pronunciation and grammar mistakes, here in Brazil English is anything but a native language! :) I hope you enjoy it, comments and bug reports welcome as usual. Soon I'll be making a version for Lightwave Modeler and add enhancements to the Layout version as well.

PS.: Today is my birthday but the present is yours, LightKeys is absolutely free to use!

Update: 0.98 version released (8/27/12), with full support to modeler. Modeler config still WIP. Enjoy!

Click Here to Download

4 comments:

Team Little Green Dog... said...

Hi Maddox,

Thanks for creating this. There certainly have been days when I'm hopping between multiple 3D apps and I really wished for something like this. I'll give it a try.

G.

Stéphane Damay said...

Hello,
Thx for the plugin, i come from Maya and i have to work on Lightwave, it's useful!
I hope you will release the modeler as well, lightwave naviguation is... not like Maya :)
Tchuss

S.

tulsacc said...

Anything of OSX users?

Prometheus said...

this file is stopped by my avast, that is necessary not so that this is infected by a virus, probably just my avast that treats it like it.

Not sure if I should make an exception for this file?

Michael/aka prometheus on newtek forums

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