New Low-Cost 3D Animation System

[Tami]

NewTek Previews Innovative New Low-Cost 3D Animation System

Maker of LightWave 3D® brings next-generation graphics toolset to graphics, illustration and design community

Seattle , WA – April 25, 2005 – NewTek, Inc., creators of the Emmy ® award-winning LightWave 3D® modeling, rendering and animation program today previewed a new, easy to use 3D product — Inspire 3D ™ . Specifically designed for non-traditional 3D markets such as print, graphic design, education, video and web creation, Inspire 3D is built atop the LightWave 3D engine, production-proven in thousands of feature films, television shows, commercials and video games, as well as dozens of newspaper and magazine graphics departments.

Inspire 3D is designed to provide graphic designers and video editors with tools to produce professional 3D results quickly. Production wizards provide the artist with the ability to generate 3D scenes and animations with just a few clicks of the mouse. Extensive content is included to aid the creative process: models, environments, lighting scenarios, textures and materials, animated sequences and more. Inspire 3D scenes and animations are easily customizable to address a wide array of artistic requirements.

“Our goal is to take the ‘fear factor’ out of making great 3D graphics,” said Jay Roth, president of NewTek’s 3D graphics division. “3D visual effects and motion graphics surround us in our everyday lives in film, television and video games — they look cool, but require years of dedicated effort to create, and for many people, that’s just too prohibitive. It has always been a challenge to make 3D truly accessible to the large number of graphic artists and video editors who we know can make exceptional use of the right tools. Our approach with Inspire 3D is simple: Inspire supplies the knowledge; the artist supplies the talent. We want Inspire 3D to be both fun and easy to use, as well as create great 3D.”

Inspire 3D takes maximum advantage of capabilities in the latest generation graphics cards, CPU’s and operating systems to provide immediate interactive feedback. Artists using the latest hardware and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will see even greater benefits, in terms of speed and capability, making creation of 3D graphics much more rewarding.

“One of the great advantages of 64-bit technology is the ability to access large amounts of memory and bandwidth quickly and effectively,” said Brian Marr, senior product manager at Microsoft Corp. “It’s great to see companies like NewTek seizing this advantage and bringing the power of 64-bit technology to the graphics community. Now that artists know that the system resources are there for them to produce complex graphics quickly and to see the results almost immediately, there is the opportunity for a whole new group of artistic professionals to pursue creation of 3-D graphics and animation.”

Pricing and Availability
Inspire 3D will have a suggested retail price of $195. Inspire 3D will be available for Windows XP, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Macintosh OS X. A free public beta program for pre-release versions of Inspire 3D is scheduled to begin in Q2, 2005. Anyone wishing to participate in the Inspire 3D public beta program may sign up on the NewTek web site at www.newtek.com/inspire3d.

[url=\"http://www.newtek.com/news/releases/04-25-05b.html\"]source: NewTek Press Releases[/url]