Lightwave 3D – is a 3D computer graphics software developed by Newtek. It has been used in film, television, motion graphics, digital matte painting, visual effects, video games development, product design, architectural visualizations, virtual production, music videos, pre-visualizations and advertising.

LightWave is composed of separate programs, primarily Modeler and Layout. Each program provides a dedicated workspace for specific tasks. When these two programs are running simultaneously, a program called Hub is used to synchronize data between the two.

Modeler, as the name implies, includes all of the modeling features used to create the 3D models, while Layout includes features to arrange the 3D models, animate, and render them. Layout offers ray tracing, global illumination, and render output parameters.

This separation is unique among 3D computer graphics packages which commonly integrate their modeler and renderer. NewTek asserts dedicating workspaces for specific tasks creates an arguably more efficient 3D production workflow. A long-standing debate in the LightWave user community has consisted of whether or not to integrate Modeler and Layout into a single program. In response to this, NewTek has begun an integration process by including several basic modeling tools with Layout.

There is also a command line-based network rendering engine named Screamernet which can be used to distribute rendering tasks across a large number of networked computers. This is used to reduce the overall time that it takes to render a single project by having the computers each rendering a part of the whole project in parallel. Screamernet includes all the features of the rendering engine that is integrated in Layout but without an interactive user interface. LightWave supports 999 render nodes natively.