Lightwave to Blender official support Request. To: Rob Powers and LW developers:

Visualbug, started a thread in Lightwave forum asking for support for an official Lightwave to Blender connection.
I would like to ask for help and put some pressure in the Lightwave forums…

Thanks!

…People still use lightwave?
No offense intended of course, I just thought that light wave died off or something.

It’s still moving along, and still being used for many tv and commercial productions. But i fear it’s best days are behind it.

:wink: I am Visualbug, jejeje

Can be a win-win for blender and lightwave,
if we get this blender <-> lightwave combination can be used in TV productions together…we need to see the big picture…lightwave need more users, blender needs to be introduced to small tv series vfx production houses ;), and more donations/support for the foundation…to improve blender…

lightwave can complement blender…and vice-versa…
Still Lightwave is great and a very capable software and can be awesome to use it with blender…and the price is more accessible ($695 “crossgrade”) than subscription base (autodesk) or MODO 1.8k, still the render is a old beast that can get great results with a lot of polygons… +1

@fdfxd yes, lightwave still in tv vfx production is used, I am watching new tv series “defiance” and yes vfx is made with lightwave + turbulence I think, and in lightwave forums there are job offers to work in this TV series…with lightwave…if blender can get his smoke-rigid simulations in lightwave, turbulence is out of the game :wink: just a quick example…

they are talking a lot about blender in LW forums:
http://forums.newtek.com/showthread.php?147418-Why-doesn-t-LW-devs-take-from-Blender&p=1441900#post1441900

I used to briefly pop into Blender to do UVs and physics when i was working in LW. After LW 9* they made series of very feature packed updates so LW’s not to be sneezed at. At the same time its paradigms are just so destructive and show its age. We loved LW due to its price/value but Blender can obviously fill that niche effortlessly.

I think perhaps a good place to start is to create LW preset (like we have Max,Maya)? Would help a lot of users explore it.

LW has always been a pretty solid package, I stopped using after my LW 8 dongle was stolen…I HAVE tried the 11.5 demo and it is still a competitive product…I do see the community slowing down. Stated earlier that is still used a lot in tv…and I see this has been true for it for a long time, and do not see the landscape changing quickly…I do feel it is sort of stagnating, but if they were to really pump up some development it might be useful to me again…
With that out of the way, I do not see a need for the LW Blender bridge…I don’t know of anything that LW does that blender cannot…and the only thing I see that lightwave would really benefit from is blenders compositer…I just do not see it as a worthwhile effort, besides wat are you talking about X-fering? mesh is not an issue.

No fairly odd parents without lightwave.

Doesn’t hurt to have official support and have a bridge with lightwave…but I want THEM support blender officially and support the blender foundation…this is a connected world, more bridge between apps better for everybody…VS monopoly (Autodesk)

We have lightwave add-on in blender for ages, is their time now.

I think a Blender-to-LW bridge could be pretty awesome. Model/animate in blender, render in LW. LW has an old but awesome renderer and a lot of great tools for fast and cheap VFX. The two apps could complement each other well.

Before anything else, I would like a Linux version of Lightwave! And yes, support toward Blender would be great too.

a lot of lightwave users around here :wink:

I use Blender and LightWave together A LOT. The thing that is missing, is that I can import a lwo to Blender but can’t export one back out. It would save a bunch of time in converting files back and forth. I have been using obj quite a bit for this, since in my current project the source files are in obj, but it would be nice to read and write lwo.