It seems like we just did a post about the LW 2025.0.2 update, but now here we are, late to the party. Still, we wanted to do a post about it, letting people know that the LightWave 2025.0.3 update was posted to our accounts at lightwave3d.com a little over a week ago, just incase you missed it.

For those of you interested in getting the change log, here it is. https://docs.lightwave3d.com/2025/2025-change-log.html
I have to stress however, that the change log is a bit confusing as there are a lot of updates to the software that are under the hood and are not listed, while other massive updates have been done that have immediate fixes that are incredibly beneficial, much more has been done that long term, is a really big deal. Besides all the work having been done with respect to the Octane for LW support and bringing that up to snuff for Octane 2025.1 or whatever it is at right now to make it competitive against the other packages that support Octane’s full features/capabilities – there is much more, just under the surface.

One of the things that stands out if you understand a little bit in regards to the long term future positive impacts of the advances being done, is the effort being put into the SDK documentation and other areas that will make developing tools for LightWave among 3rd party developers, easier, and most importantly, very attractive.

Developing tools that are revolutionary in the 3D world is a challenge to say the least. Yet LightWave3D has seen some of the most biggest game-changing tools in 3D over the course of its 35 year history. From the early days of tools from Dynamic Realities, to the legendary Gaffer, G2 and later FPrime era of plug-ins from Steve Worley/Worley Labs, Denis Pontonier, DStorm, 3rd Powers and countless others which includes us here at Liberty3d.com, LightWave has always had an edge in many areas of 3D creative content production. However, due to market shifts, competition and the incompetence of previous LW management/ownership, much of that edge became dulled. This resulted in 3rd party developers straying away from LightWave3D in order to maintain their businesses as user numbers waned and uncertainty of the future of the product was in doubt for nearly 20 years, or simply exiting the business altogether.

It’s a hard business to make money in these days and to be frank, its been hard for every 3d product on the market for many years. While some might point to Blender as the cause of this, and to a certain extent this is true, Blender has a whole slew of its own problems that combined with other factors could result in its downfall if not a massive fumble, leaving opportunity and strategic moves by other product manufacturers a means to fight back and retake ground lost to it or rise above entirely.

Let’s be blunt. The entire VFX industry has been going through massive changes over the last 10 years. We’ve seen many power applications like E-On Vue, TreeFactory and Luxology/Foundry Modo bite the dust in the last 16 months alone. Cinema4D, once considered to be an unstoppable juggernaut just a few years ago, seems to have slipped in popularity among production houses and independent artists worldwide in part because of 3rd party developer challenges, economics (ie, pricing models) and other abuses of the userbase by “management”.  3DS Max, which seems to have stalled almost entirely for development since 2017 and 3rd party developer products like PhoenixFD, Krakatoa, RealFlow, VRay and many more, available for the usual suspects, having never considered LightWave3D or turned away from it during the “Powers” era, are now facing their own dulling situation with 3DS Max and even as mature as 3DSMax is in terms of codebase, its SDK is considered by some to be a total disaster when compared to LightWave3D even before the improvements having being made to LightWave3D’s SDK and accompaning documentation over the last year.

Today the game is different and it’s different because LightWave is now in the hands of people who actually use it in production, for one, but also because of the efforts of the development team on the side of improving and updating not only the SDK documentation but several areas of the underlying codebase to make it easier for 3rd party development to take place. What is needed is more users. That means you, first and foremost. So if you haven’t upgraded, please upgrade.

We also need more schools and training as well. We have been since our founding, sat the forefront of training for LightWave3D and I personally am doing everything I can to get more eductational institutions on board. We also need more use of the software on high-profile productions. That is actually happening and has been a constant, despite what some might have been lead to believe, but we also need those “hollywood” artists that use LW on those productions, who always seem to hide out in the shadows to step into the Light, and upgrade their seats. It’ rather shocking how many of them are still on LW 2015 or even earlier. They also need to talk about the work they are doing on these shows and why LW is the choice for them and why it should for you, the loyal LW user and why it should be so as well for new potential users. Seasoned or just starting out. We also need to keep pushing our work with LightWave3D and do so more aggressively through social media to various 3D and VFX groups on FB for example, as well as continue to post and publish or work as much as possible for use by LightWave Digital’s marketing team to post on their Social Media accounts on X, Instagram, Threads, FB, etc. I’ve already put the call out to many of you to help in this effort, and it’s turned some heads, especially in the wake of the EOL of Modo, which brought a huge number of artists that left LightWave3D for Modo years ago, back into the fold. Hopefully, with these updates and better documentation to the SDK, we can bring across some of the 3rd developers for those other products across as well.

Not all updates are going to be packed with super wiz-bang revolutionary tools for use as ammo for us to shove in the faces of the Blender/Maya/Max fanboi masses. That’s not what this is about. It’s about setting things up so that we don’t even care, because the long game is to re-take and then surpass the positions held by some of LightWave’s oldest competitors who used some really awful tactics to try and destroy LightWave, and now are seemingly faced with having the situation reversed. The SDK updates and documentation updates are critical to that effort among others. Other areas of the update in LW 2025 in general and now with the 2025.0.3 patch, from my own personal experience, has been instrumental in my use of it on the two movies (being shot back to back) that I am working on now alongside many of those “hollywood” people. Most of which have been working in LW 2015, but are now moving to the modern era over the last few weeks with LW 2024.2 and very tempted by LW 2025 as it’s proven over the course of the last 3 months to be in my section of the work being done, once again, as the rock solid foundation in a mixed application pipeline where other tools haven’t performed so well. Hopefully, I will be able to talk about all of that shortly, but since it is an ongoing production right now and I simply can’t at the moment. There is a likelihood, though that these two movies will result in a box office pull internationally, of over 1 billion dollars. So when I can, you better believe I want the rest of the art team to do so the same and coordinate with LightWave Digital on that for maximum effort marketing purposes.

Once I have a bit of downtime, which is coming soon as I am in the middle of a move, (thankfully just a few miles away and not across continents or oceans like I usually do) – I will begin to record new tutorials highlighting these enhancements that don’t seem to be reflected  in the change logs to the product in the LW 2025 cycle thus far and how these improvements have worked so well in the production environment that I have been using it in on these shows. However, if you have been actively using it day in and day out, like I have been,  you will notice the little things, which over time, add up to a big deal.