Many of you have been following the development of Steve Hurley’s Advanced Placement over the past couple of years. You will be happy to know that the 1.0 version of Advance Placement is now shipping and it’s feature complete! Here is Steve’s post on the LW forums ( you can find the original post and discussion here http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?146551-Advanced-Placement-1-0-is-shipping&p=1430139#post1430139) below. Make sure you visit his site for youtube video links to see what this product can do for you. We will be picking up copies ourselves shortly and producing training for Advanced Placement soon.   “Hi Everyone! We’re pleased to announce the release of Advanced Placement 1.0 for LightWave! From now until May 10, you can save $50 by purchasing AP at the special launch pricing of $149. http://hurleyworks.com/buy/ AP was designed to be an artist friendly tool for physics based placement of items and their instances in your LW scene. It includes it’s own physics engine, instance generator, undo system and a special capture/playback system for recording and playing back physics simulations that you can interact with as you make them. Here’s a few of the fun things you can do with AP Workflow demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yaBZVr-s80 Collision free instance painting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZnwDp_tHVA Capture and playback physics simulations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjDZKQiAU-M Emit instances from item geometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QONBLrQCVAU Instance lights and other non-mesh items like cameras and nulls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbVUXVltdFI Build complex instance compounds from other instances https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipvwnje5yT0 Export AP instances to LW instances https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx0IINc42u4 Export AP instances to a single LW mesh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiUAKIGV89o More demos are available on our YouTube site https://www.youtube.com/user/HurleyworksInc/feed Please be aware that if your project requires tens of thousands or millions of instances then AP may not be the right tool for the job. AP has extra memory requirements for it’s command and physics systems and the physics engine itself can’t handle anywhere near that many bodies and still remain interactive. We’ve provided a demo version that is not crippled in regard to instance handling capabilities. Please try the demo first before buying AP if you think high instance counts might be a problem for you. Although this is AP 1.0, those of you who have followed AP’s development in the 3rd party section know that AP is a very mature product for a initial release. We’re very excited to finally be able to “Release the Kraken!” ” Awesome job Steve! We love 3rd Party Developers!