

Lightworks Author was the first product launched by Lightwork Design. Lightworks' current products are Lightworks Author and Iray+. This SDK, called Iray+, is intended to provide physically accurate ray-tracing to clients who need to present their products to customers, and will have the ability to use cloud- and network-based rendering. Recent developments Partnership with NVIDIA Īt SIGGRAPH 2013, Lightworks announced a new partnership with NVIDIA to develop an SDK to provide access to NVIDIA's Iray technology. In 1999, Lightworks and Intel formed a partnership, and the company started to develop their products for the Linux platform.

In 1997, Lightworks launched a large model navigation system called Navisworks, which was sold in 2007 to Autodesk for $26 million.

This led to the foundation of MachineWorks, which is now a separate company. In 1995 Lightworks began to develop the MachineWorks toolkit. The company signed their first international customer, CPU of Japan, in 1994. Sales of the initial Lightworks product commenced in early 1991, and the company signed their first major CAD developer, Unigraphics (now Siemens) in 1993. The first Lightworks product was demonstrated at the 1990 Autofact exhibition in Detroit, USA. While originally based in the Sheffield Science Park, Lightworks is now based in Rutledge House, a building situated next to the Sheffield Botanical Gardens and originally built in the 1850s as the Victoria Park Hotel. Lightworks was founded in Sheffield in 1989, with the goal to create a software toolkit for producing photorealistic renders from 3D geometry. Its headquarters are in Sheffield, United Kingdom. is a computer software company specialising in 3D Rendering software.
