Lightscape Technologies Inc of San Jose, California has tuned up its suite of 3D graphics visualization and lighting tools, upgrading the display and editing speeds of its Lightscape Visualization System 3.0 for Windows 95 and NT by a factor of three and speeded up the ray tracer by four times. The upgraded $500 program includes a new mesh-to-texture tool to convert the polygon mesh used for radiosity into a much smaller texture map file. LVS 3.0 also has a new Softimage importer and improved support for 3D Studio R4 files. Upgrades from LVS 2.0.1 for NT are $200, free for those who bought the older version after September 1. LVS 3.0 is the first version from the San Diego, California company that supports Win95 as well as NT, but the tool is still a hefty one that eats up 500Mb of space on a hard drive, needs 32Mb of RAM and works best with an OpenGL-compliant graphics board.
