lightwave 2015, new version of lightwave is out!

looks that the dinosaur is back in track with this new version:

lightwave 2015

Some of the new features look nice, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot beyond the more complete Bullet Physics integration and rigging tool enhancements.

Okay I get it, Newtek probably doesn’t have quite as much money for development as Autodesk or even Maxon, but it looks to me like they are doomed to perpetuity in the catch-up phase as long as their releases are smaller than the competition’s (especially after a year).

In fact, some of the Blender point releases after three months are about the same size in terms of total functionality additions and improvements, they need to step on the gas if they want to get back into the game.

meh…

(ten characters)

Supposedly, based on what I read in their forums, they have been doing some deeper changes to the code that will start to unify the two app. structure that they have right now (or at least reduce the divide).

Not going to be something you would see tomorrow since the Lightwave architecture is still pretty entrenched in the idea of its modeling capabilities being completely separate.

History lesson here… or just me rambling on uselessly…

Lightwave was authored by people who wrote another 3d app first… bonus points to any one who knows that…

Newtek hired these devs and Lightwave was born. Before it was lightwave, it was a modeler program and an animation/rendering program. The last time I looked at it, it was still the same. A modeler, and an animation/render program. 2 separate apps really.

To unify the 2 apps, the modeller and the animation/renderer might require a lot of coding, As far as I know, light wave has always been 2 apps.

Lightwave has been used on a lot of television shows, lower budget productions than movies, but it has a lot of credits…

I might want to look at Lightwave again… seems like it has made some progress since that last time I toyed with it…

Randy

Match perspective: a tool like that should be standard in Blender. For the rest is fully in the meh… territory.

Nice glitch around 1:25 :smiley:

@ jbp06

Blam seems to be already taking care of that since a couple of years?

  • you are right in some way since blam isn´t integrated in Blenders addon list when you download a buildbot version.

Notice how these “new feature” videos never show the tedium of weight painting? :slight_smile:

Looking good, as always.

If I ever return to windows(9? 10?) or Lightwave goes Linux, then I will probably add it to my collection - at least for rendering. I personally think they shouldn’t integrate modeller & layout, as I’m a firm believer that modelling is best done in a separate package.

Looking forward to the next release.

wow, nice animation tools! :slight_smile:

I wish there was a linux version

@myclay thank you for the info, since I am not interested in animations/video I did not know about it.

The only problem is that it is not in trunk and I am extremely wary of relying upon non-trunk plugins [1].

[1] the plugin is not in trunk, the underlying API change, sooner or later the plugin developer realizes that he is not a hamster and gets out of the wheel (aka stopping updating the plugin) and the plugin is dead.

i will only touch LW if I can upgrade online from my country

mumble grumble something something local distributor something something grrrrr

Have you actually used it? If I compare the BLAM to the Sketchups camera calibration, the user interaction of blam is not very good. Yes it is useable, it is free, but not very user friendly and well integrated. I am really glad that someone coded BLAM but telling that this is really comparable to what is in the lightwave video is misleading.

A bit off-topic, but have your reported your usability issues to the add-on’s developer?

Cool stuff.
But why we don’t have fullscreen option for youtube videos here on the forum?

Apparently, LW is going to get a major update down the road, but it’s quickly falling behind… that’s why they keep releasing these tools that studio users have requested; to keep the lions at bay.

Back when NewTek announced CORE there was a lot of excitement and folks losing their minds. Then they canned CORE and went with incremental updates. That was 2009-2010, so it’s been a while. If they had continued to develop CORE separately, they’d now, today, have 2 3D apps and could migrate their users over to the new one, thereby making everyone happy. I know that sounds impractical, and if a studio relies on an app to get their jobs done it’s tough to just switch, which is what they were afraid of – all their users having to switch to a new application during production. But think about it… you continue working with the old app and transition slowly over to the new one when you get a chance. There’s no “Oh no!!! we can’t do our job because NewTek came out with a new app!! OMG the humanity!” Come on. You either innovate or you die, that simple.

I’ll continue on with Blender, which has passed LW by in many ways.

I’m still waiting for realistic caustics for Cycles. Lightwave had it 1998, I remember it clearly.

Cycles has the most realistic caustics there are, they just take a long time to clear up… it’s LW that has the fake, photon mapped caustic approximations.


This is Cycles rendering with sun light and default glass material. I must be missing something, right? Let’s look at how it’s supposed to look like, using the same scene with Luxrender:


Maybe I’m doing something wrong. But I wonder what could it be?