About QV

About QV

On June 17, 1996, a month or so after LightWave 5.0 appeared, I released a free LightWave render display plug-in called QV. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, I posted the announcement to the LightWave mailing list using Pine running on an Amiga A2000, and the list server was Dan McCoy's Tomahawk FTP machine, connected to the Internet via ISDN.

After months of real-world testing and a number of enhancements, QV was bundled with LightWave the following spring. The bundled version was also available as a free download from both my website (then on DigEx) and NewTek's.

In October of 1998 I released QV 3.0, an inexpensive commercial version of QV that added fast zooming, scrolling and flipping between images, separate R, G, B and A display, hot and safe overlays, antialiased text, and image saving in any format supported by LightWave. Since LightWave itself didn't provide hooks that plug-ins could use to save images, QV called the saver plug-ins directly, a hack never attempted before or since by any publicly available plug-in, as far as I know.

In 1999, I was tapped to write the documentation for the LightWave 6 plug-in SDK. LightWave 6 was a complete rewrite that, among other things, made the image saver hack unnecessary. But I was (and still am!) too busy to update QV, and in any case, LightWave now ships with its own fairly capable render display.

If you own QV 3.0, you can still use it with newer versions of LightWave. The one thing QV can't do, without some help, is find your image saver plug-ins. LightWave changed the format of its config files, and this broke the method QV 3.0 uses to locate image savers. You can fix this by creating a text file that lists each saver.

Using a plain text editor such as Notepad, write a line for each image saver plug-in that looks like the following.

Plugin ImageSaver name filename

There are three parts to each line:

Plugin ImageSaver at the beginning of the line.

The format name and the default filename extension in parentheses. For the Alias saver, for example, this would be LW_Alias(.als). This is just what gets shown in the File Types dropdown list on the QV file dialog. It isn't critical that this be exactly right. Just don't put any spaces in it.

The complete filename of the .p file, including the path. For the Alias saver, this might be
```
E:\NewTek\Programs\Plugins\Input-Output\Alias.p
```

You can copy and paste some of this from your lwext3.cfg file, which is where newer versions of LightWave store information about plug-ins.

Save your new text file as lw.cfg and put it in the directory where the Layout binary (lightwav.exe) is, usually Programs\LightWave_Support. QV will find it there and use it the same way it uses the real configuration file for versions of LightWave prior to 6.0.