Wednesday, September 14th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

WTools3D releases LWCAD 5.2


LWCAD’s new NURBS modelling functionality, shown here in a video from 2014, and now available commercially as part of the 5.x series of releases of the popular LightWave modelling toolset.


Originally posted on 29 October 2014. Scroll down for updates, including news of the 5.2 release.

WTools3D – aka developer Viktor Veličko – has announced LWCAD 5: the latest update to its set of LightWave modelling plugins, adding new tools for working with NURBS, including a new ‘NURBS polygon’ geometry type.

A fixture of many LightWave artists’ toolboxes for nearly a decade, LWCAD provides a complete set of standard CAD tools within the software, including a powerful set of real-time Boolean tools.

NURBS tools with the accessibility of polygonal modelling?
LWCAD 5 adds a new set of tools for working with NURBS curves and surfaces to the software, including the option to close NURBS curves and improvements to cutting and interpolation.

The toolset should also make editing NURBS much simpler: Veličko notes the “most beautiful improvement” in LWCAD 5 is the power to modify curves by clicking and dragging anywhere, not just at control points.

There is also an intriguing new NURBS polygon geometry type, in which every edge of a polygon becomes a separate NURBS curve segment, and can be manipulated with the NURBS toolset.

Collectively, the new tools hint at faster, more intuitive ways to work with NURBS surfaces.

As one post on The Foundry forum put it: “I think Sub-Ds are polygons with complexity of NURBS. Whereas what Viktor has done in LWCAD … is NURBS with the accessibility of polygons.”



LWCAD 5 will also introduce a new Smart Edit system, shown in the video above, designed to “compress a complete set of edit operations … into a minimalistic set of new tools”.

There are also a set of smaller features and updates, which you can find via the link below.



Updated 10 November 2015: LWCAD 5 has now been released. You can see a new overview video above, and videos of the individual features in this YouTube playlist.

New licences of LWCAD 5 will cost $329. The current release runs on LightWave 9+ on Windows and Mac.

Read a full list of new features in LWCAD 5.0



Updated 14 September 2016: WTools3D has released LWCAD 5.2, the latest update to the plugin.

The release revamps LWCAD’s cloning functionality, introducing a range of new tools and adding built-in randomisation and collision modules. Other changes include a new tool for randomising UV maps.

Read a full list of features in LWCAD 5.2