It's been quite some time (six months, which might as well have been during the Nixon administration) since the first installment of this series, so there's no time like the present to press on with our whirlwind tour of various lighting features in LightWave. Today, we're going to go through a fairly simple technique that can add a hint of radiosity to your scenes without the usual associated rendering hit. Intrigued? Of course you are. So let's begin...

If you're a Flash designer, there are probably a million reasons why you might be reluctant to go down the ActionScript road. I know, because I probably went through each of those reasons myself before I finally bit the bullet. But learning at least a little about ActionScript can really help you take your design work to the next level, so over the coming weeks I'll be showing you a few tricks that should help make the leap into ActionScripting a little less jarring. First, though, I'm going to have to address the skeptics.

Just in case you've been vacationing in a cave for the last few weeks, Apple's recent introduction of Motion was one of the splashier news items to come out of NAB. Since then, many have pontificated (myself included) about what Motion's arrival could signal for the Macintosh motion graphics/compositing space in general and Adobe's plans for After Effects on the Mac in particular. To help clear things up, Steve Kilisky, Adobe's Product Manager for After Effects, sat down with us recently to respond to a few burning questions.