Lightwave offer

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Pancho
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by Pancho » 07 Mar 2014, 17:16

kat wrote:So when it comes to manpower, typically LW requires smaller teams.
Compared to what?

Of course LW requires smaller teams, as the work you can do with it is not cutting edge and if it is, than it'll take 2-4x the time another production may have needed.

Try to do some animal animation with hair and hair dynamics in LW. It'll take many times longer than in SI as LW's toolset isn't made to do this in a realistic way (some funky furry ball, o.k., but not a realistically groomed animal). So a LW team wouldn't get this kind of work in the first place.

For hard surface animation, a lunar lander or spaceship: Never mid the package, as long as it can handle the amount os polys. Probably LW in this area is a bit quicker than for instance Maya. But the so often quoted opinion that you can do stuff in LW more effective or with less manpower is a legend.

P.S.: I was one of the first persons working with fprime. These were the days when LW rocked. Now, a decade later, this plugin has finally made it into LW itself. This tells you a lot about the speed of development over at Newtek.

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ryanroye
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by ryanroye » 07 Mar 2014, 18:41

Pancho wrote:Now, a decade later, this plugin has finally made it into LW itself. This tells you a lot about the speed of development over at Newtek.
Why would Newtek want to smash a 3rd party developer's creation and make a redundant tool? They pretty much waited until Worely quit development on Fprime before they decided to integrate the functionality directly into Lightwave. I think it was a smart move.
Pancho wrote:Try to do some animal animation with hair and hair dynamics in LW. It'll take many times longer than in SI as LW's toolset isn't made to do this in a realistic way (some funky furry ball, o.k., but not a realistically groomed animal).
I agree hair simulation is not as easy as it could be. Possible, but not a strong area of Lightwave. I disagree regarding animation and other dynamics systems however. Last time I checked, most animation programs don't allow you to propel your character relative to their current position, scale, leg proportions and orientation without any coding or manual moving or even node setups. If this workflow has existed for over a decade... I think it speaks volumes as to how much potential was lost by the LW3dG's mistake of not documenting stuff like this; I do believe that is and will continue to be changed for the better.

Again, people need to look at the projects they will run into in order to justify the cost vs. benefits of the application they buy into. If people/studios can afford to train their employees in multiple high-priced software packages each and take advantage of the things they excel in, then I see no reason not to if they have the cash on hand and time to invest. Modeling in Maya isn't super, animation in 3dsmax is lackluster... yet they cost several times more than Lightwave and will also force users into subscription plans that require a yearly fee of $4500-6000 for both programs (the price which says explicitly in the fine print that they can change at any time). Lightwave happens to be able to do both, for a hell of a lot less, and with many of the same core tools and features. The major differences lie in the specific scenarios/needs of the production.

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MauricioPC
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by MauricioPC » 07 Mar 2014, 20:07

I think people don't one good thing about this ... for $ 495 you can have an amazing render, better than Mental Ray.

This "my software makes better fx than yours" is a waist of time. If I had Softimage, I would surely buy LightWave since just the render would be a nice addition.

Pancho
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by Pancho » 07 Mar 2014, 20:26

You'd buy Redshift first, trust me.

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MauricioPC
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by MauricioPC » 07 Mar 2014, 20:38

Pancho wrote:You'd buy Redshift first, trust me.

I need to try Redshift ... it's time to install Maya. :x

robpowers
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by robpowers » 07 Mar 2014, 21:06

MauricioPC wrote:I'm still hoping Rob Will came back and say: "ok Mauricio, you didnt buy Softimage but I'll let you be part of The rebelion. You can buy LW with this promotion. Welcome aboard.". :D
Hi Mauricio, Contact our customer support on the lightwave3d.com website. I'll let them know to look for your email.

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MauricioPC
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by MauricioPC » 07 Mar 2014, 21:17

robpowers wrote:
MauricioPC wrote:I'm still hoping Rob Will came back and say: "ok Mauricio, you didnt buy Softimage but I'll let you be part of The rebelion. You can buy LW with this promotion. Welcome aboard.". :D
Hi Mauricio, Contact our customer support on the lightwave3d.com website. I'll let them know to look for your email.
Done!

kat
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by kat » 07 Mar 2014, 23:46

Pancho wrote:
kat wrote:So when it comes to manpower, typically LW requires smaller teams.
Compared to what?

Of course LW requires smaller teams, as the work you can do with it is not cutting edge and if it is, than it'll take 2-4x the time another production may have needed.

Try to do some animal animation with hair and hair dynamics in LW. It'll take many times longer than in SI as LW's toolset isn't made to do this in a realistic way (some funky furry ball, o.k., but not a realistically groomed animal). So a LW team wouldn't get this kind of work in the first place.

For hard surface animation, a lunar lander or spaceship: Never mid the package, as long as it can handle the amount os polys. Probably LW in this area is a bit quicker than for instance Maya. But the so often quoted opinion that you can do stuff in LW more effective or with less manpower is a legend.

P.S.: I was one of the first persons working with fprime. These were the days when LW rocked. Now, a decade later, this plugin has finally made it into LW itself. This tells you a lot about the speed of development over at Newtek.

Yeah, Pancho... I've heard that many times from many people, the thing is its simply not really true.
here are some tid bits. http://lightwavebox.blogspot.com.es/2014/03/lwer-david-ridlen.html
I agree, furry balls (err, that doesn't sound right!) are lame and I hate seeing that kind of stuff in the LW content.
Thing is there is so much work that LW has done that no one really knows about in film effects, that even other companies put on their reels because they assume it was done with their software. It happens. There is an old saying, "LightWave, Saving Maya Productions since 1998" in hollywood. I laughed when I heard that, because its absolutely true. I cried about it later when I personally had to experience what kind of stuff we would have to fix for maya artists. Why? Because LightWavers would get sidelined for work that we absolutely could do that Maya artists had problems with and were getting paid double or triple - Because they used Maya? Like what? What what? Butters?

It just didn't make sense to me. It still doesn't. There is way too much software prejudice out there and LW gets way more hate thrown at it than it should.

Ok maybe LW is not XSI or Maya, but for what LW does it's extremely good at and getting better, and certainly has a lot less overhead.

curly
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Joined: 06 Oct 2010, 08:43

Re: Lightwave offer

Post by curly » 02 Apr 2014, 18:41

I would like to ask Rob a couple of questions about LW roadmap. I'm already a registered LW 11.6 user. One of my favorite updates is the Bullet physics and the Cloth simulation and simulation on Fiberfx Hair. It's super fast if you have a good graphics card.

For making LW even more powerful for character animation we still need a couple of things.

1) At this moment you can't instance animated characters. In the videos of the LA LW usersgroup they say there working on that. What's the status for that?
2) I would like to have a scene layering system. So you can organise objects on scene layers. Very good if you have large scenes.
3) Could expand the flocking and instancing system with nodes, so we have our node based crowd simulation system.
4) When learning Lightwave, I came across this wonderful tool called TAFA facial animation. It's one of the best kept secrets of facial animation. I've tried the demo and was impressed by the user friendliness of the software. Could you integrate that in Lightwave, pleaaaasee?
5) We need more node based particle stuff in LW. The empolygoniser stuff or the 3DS max Thinkbox Frost stuff.
6) I would like to have an option to save and store poses and an animation layer system. Now you can save an store poses with IK Booster, but I'd like to have something more advanced.
7) In the octane render forum they say you guys haven't released the SDK for the FiberFX plugin, so you can't render GPU generated hair with Octane.

If you look at the feature set and bang for the buck wise, Lightwave is for me one of the best packages out there. If you look at the amount of features they add each and every time, I'm always impressed.

Thanks in advance for reading this post.

kat
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by kat » 02 Apr 2014, 22:21

Hi Curly.
I will see if I can get rob to jump in on here. There are some answers I can provide for you however.
curly wrote:I would like to ask Rob a couple of questions about LW roadmap. I'm already a registered LW 11.6 user. One of my favorite updates is the Bullet physics and the Cloth simulation and simulation on Fiberfx Hair. It's super fast if you have a good graphics card.

Yeah those are both great features... but they are not graphics card dependent. They work if you have a super-duper graphics card or not.

For making LW even more powerful for character animation we still need a couple of things.

1) At this moment you can't instance animated characters. In the videos of the LA LW usersgroup they say there working on that. What's the status for that?
Uh... You can instance practically anything that is geometry. The work flow for this is to animate character 1, MDD scan it, instance it and go using nodal for instance animation offsets of the MDD. Are you wanting to be able to animate the characters using bones/defs after animation?

2) I would like to have a scene layering system. So you can organise objects on scene layers. Very good if you have large scenes.

This is a workflow issue. If you have worked in a LightWave production there are various techniques used to organize things nicely.

3) Could expand the flocking and instancing system with nodes, so we have our node based crowd simulation system.

Hmmm. Yeah.

4) When learning Lightwave, I came across this wonderful tool called TAFA facial animation. It's one of the best kept secrets of facial animation. I've tried the demo and was impressed by the user friendliness of the software. Could you integrate that in Lightwave, pleaaaasee?

And it still is! TAFA (Timothy Albee's Facial Animation by Mac Ritter) is a wonderful tool and I used to work with Tim. I hope to be able to use TAFA extensively on my next project. Last time I spoke to Mac, he was looking to build the next generation TAFA into or in Unity3D. That was a year ago. I should check in. Frankly this should be in LightWave and should have been years ago. Today I could see it or something like it as part of ChronoSculpt
5) We need more node based particle stuff in LW. The empolygoniser stuff or the 3DS max Thinkbox Frost stuff.
Yup. :)

6) I would like to have an option to save and store poses and an animation layer system. Now you can save an store poses with IK Booster, but I'd like to have something more advanced.

Absolutely check out Ryan Roye's videos on IK Booster as well as look for a tool from Origami Digital called aptly enough... Animation Layers.
7) In the octane render forum they say you guys haven't released the SDK for the FiberFX plugin, so you can't render GPU generated hair with Octane.

I will let Rob comment on this.


If you look at the feature set and bang for the buck wise, Lightwave is for me one of the best packages out there. If you look at the amount of features they add each and every time, I'm always impressed.Absofreakinglootly correct :)

Thanks in advance for reading this post.

markraz
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by markraz » 03 May 2014, 20:10

they still make lightwave?

kat
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by kat » 03 May 2014, 20:26

Yes. They still make LightWave.... Jesus....
Seriously?

luchifer
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by luchifer » 03 May 2014, 21:04

markraz wrote:they still make lightwave?
yes, unlike softimage.

markraz
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by markraz » 04 May 2014, 01:16

kat wrote:Yes. They still make LightWave.... Jesus....
Seriously?
well yeah I was being serious. Last time I used LW was on my Amiga
so it's been a while. I never hear the word anymore so that's why I asked

kat
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by kat » 04 May 2014, 03:29

www.lightwave3d.com

angus_davidson
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Re: Lightwave offer

Post by angus_davidson » 05 May 2014, 10:51

kat wrote:Yes. They still make LightWave.... Jesus....
Seriously?
Hi Kat

Sadly there seems to be only one company that has done a worse job of publicising their software then Autodesk with Softimage and that is Newtek I am afraid. It is very much a prevalent perception. I have gotten the same response from quite a few people that I have spoken to during this transition time when trying to find out what their long term planning.

There is a lot of nice stuff in the new LW but the message just really isn't getting out there at all.

Kind regards

Angus
--
Technomancer at Digital Arts
Wits University

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