Originally intended to be called "NewTek 3D Animation System for the Amiga", Hastings later came up with the name "LightWave 3D", inspired by two contemporary high-end 3D packages: Intelligent Light and Wavefront.

LightWave was used to create special effects for the television series Babylon 5,[2] Star Trek: Voyager, Space: Above and Beyond, seaQuest DSV, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica.

In its ninth version, the market for LightWave ranges from hobbyists to high-end deployment in video games, television and cinema.

[citation needed] On February 4, 2009, NewTek announced "LightWave CORE" its next-generation 3D application via a streamed live presentation to 3D artists around the world.

[3] It featured a highly customizable and modernized user interface, Python scripting integration that offered realtime code and view previews, an updated file format based on the industry standard Collada format, substantial revisions to its modeling technologies and a realtime iterative viewport renderer.

[6] LightWave 11 incorporates many new features, such as instancing, flocking and fracturing tools, flexible Bullet Dynamics, Pixologic Zbrush support, and more.

FiberFX, the hair/fur system in LightWave, also saw improvements with the 11.5 release, to work with soft bodies and to also directly support curves from Modeler for guiding hair.

[12] This release brought a new animation tool, spline control, along with improvements to ray casting (to enable items in the scene to be precisely positioned on a surface, with optional offset.

The virtual studio system was also enhanced to support a LightWave 3D group-authored add-on called NevronMotion, enabling direct motion capture (full body and facial) using consumer devices such as the Kinect (on Windows only) and re-targeting via a simplified user interface.

Features include: Physically Based Rendering System, Render & Light Buffers, New Volumetric Engine, OpenVDB Support, New Lighting Architecture, Surface Editor - Material Nodes & Surface Preview, Virtual Reality Camera, Modifier Stack & Nodal Modifiers, New Cel Shader & Enhanced Edge Rendering, More Integrated FiberFX, Layout-based Parametric Shapes, Physically Based OpenGL, & a Noise Reduction Filter.

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.

LightWave provides dynamics physics systems supporting hard and soft body motion, deformation, constraint, motorization, environments, and particles.

LightWave includes both Bullet and legacy proprietary (comprising ClothFX, SoftFX, HardFX, ParticleFX emitter, wind, collision, and gravity) dynamics engines.

Different modes of operation have the ability to generate appearances that mimic: LightWave comes with a nodal texture editor that comes with a collection of special-purpose material shaders.

[16] These free nodes enable modifying images, renders, procedural textures, Hypervoxels, object motions, animation channels, and volumetric lights.

[18] Prior to being made available as a stand-alone product in 1994, LightWave required the presence of a Video Toaster in an Amiga to run.

Until version 11.0.3,[19][20] LightWave licenses were bound to a hardware dongle (e.g. Safenet USB or legacy parallel port models).