NewTek announced Wednesday the formation of a new Burbank-based division, the LightWave 3D Group, which will be led by Rob Powers, formerly NewTek's VP and Head of 3D Development. Dominick Spina joined the new group today as VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. Powers came to NewTek two years ago after completing work for James Cameron's Avatar as animation technical director and virtual art department supervisor and as virtual art department supervisor for Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's The Adventures of Tintin. Spina was most recently a senior technology product manager at NVIDIA and has worked on GPU-rendering projects with major studios including ILM, Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Weta Digital. He also managed, while at Digital Domain, the development and commercial rollout of the Nuke compositing program now owned and developed by The Foundry.
In addition to better positioning LightWave among its core user base on the West Coast, the formation of the new division is a nod to LightWave's long and prominent history in 3D animation. The software program, used in film and television, as well as in architectural and scientific animation, was the first to introduce polygonal sub-d modeling and HDRI rendering. It was also the first 64-bit 3D software to appear on the Windows platform.
For more information: LightWave 3D Group
