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.