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Subject: Where is everybody?


TalleyJC ( ) posted Tue, 21 April 2015 at 2:14 PM · edited Mon, 11 March 2024 at 6:59 PM

So,

I know I haven't been all that present here as I  have nothing really worth commenting on for Lightwave.  I purchased the 2015 upgrade, now two patches in without actually installing it. With other stuff going on, I'm not even sure the last time I fired up 11.6

I noticed today that there have been no posts at all for the last 45 days, which is slow even for this group.  This type of "dead" is usually in the summer.

I'm wondering if we should ask that Rendo close down this forum, although I would hate to see it go as I know the few that stuck around are really good guys. I assume most of you are watching the Newtek site, but even there I'm not seeing a whole lot of creative activity.


petes ( ) posted Tue, 21 April 2015 at 8:18 PM · edited Wed, 22 April 2015 at 9:15 AM

Hey Amigo. Been busy working on some movies. Just finished a Kurt Russle flick, now playing on a Paul Rudd flick. Lightwave is still the go to 3D app when needed. 

I got 2015...seems decent, but I have an animated character coming up soon that needs hair, so that makes me a bit nervous.  I've heard mixed things about FFX  guess I'll find out soon enough  

Good to hear from you  

any other old school Rendoguys still floating around??

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


TalleyJC ( ) posted Wed, 22 April 2015 at 2:20 PM

Albert still pops up here and there, but alas I haven't seen him in a while


petes ( ) posted Fri, 24 April 2015 at 6:17 PM

seems 25 non-exsisitn people viewed this...come on people...don't be shy...think of it like a reunion show.

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


Warlock279 ( ) posted Fri, 24 April 2015 at 10:12 PM

Seems I must have refreshed the page about 25 times. Sorry 'bout that.

Core i7 950@3.02GHz | 12GB Corsair Dominator Ram@1600mHz | 2GB Geforce GTX 660


Lightwave | Blender | Marmoset | GIMP | Krita


petes ( ) posted Sat, 25 April 2015 at 12:22 PM

Seems I must have refreshed the page about 25 times. Sorry 'bout that.

LOL, good to hear from you buddy! How's things?

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


TalleyJC ( ) posted Mon, 27 April 2015 at 12:11 PM

Nobody loves us Pete...  Come to think of it... I guess nobody loves you. I'm adored by everyone.


petes ( ) posted Mon, 27 April 2015 at 1:15 PM

It comes with age my friend. and you? Hell..even your hair couldn't stand to be near you! ;)

hope all is well my man. 

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


TalleyJC ( ) posted Thu, 30 April 2015 at 2:32 PM

Not true. As you mention age, like old people moving to florida, my hair simply moved south - to my back.


Black__Days ( ) posted Fri, 01 May 2015 at 10:57 PM

I'll just ask my questions about Lightwave here. Hope nobody minds.

I'm looking for a new software to go to, since Autodesk has lost their collective minds and is going subscription only, and am wondering about Lightwave. I hear things that aren't encouraging about the company, but the software seems solid. It's also not too pricey for a poor boy like me. Would it be a good fit for someone planning to do general CG work freelance, and making a little side money by selling game assets through various online stores.

The general CG work thing is foregone conclusion, most likely, but people keep warning me away from Lightwave for games. Why?


In the beginning the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.


petes ( ) posted Mon, 04 May 2015 at 9:29 PM

No need to stay away from LW. It's a truly robust program, I run my VFX business with it. It comes down to the best tool for the job. Is MAYA probably better suited for doing an animated king kong? Sure..it offers things that LW does't like muscle simulations etc. But that also comes with a much bigger pipeline and staff. But if you are honest, ask yourself, what best fits your clients needs and budgets? If you are doing smaller movies, say under 5-10 million, or even tv series, LW is a perfect choice. It's very productive, especially with small teams, and it creates a great look in a fraction of most other apps.

Can you do game assets? Sure! it has a pretty good modeler..use to be one of the best. Still decent. The only part that you'd be missing is if your game asset required some normal mapping. In which case there are several "paint" programs that would support LW in that. Some programs like MODO would let you do it all in that one program. But for modeling the actual asset, LW is just fine! Do a little research and see what best fits your needs. But don't let some fan boys who just yell out the most expensive or shiniest program yell out what's better without knowing your actual needs.

Good luck!

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


AlbertGriffin ( ) posted Tue, 05 May 2015 at 7:18 PM

I try to stay active. It's hard, it seems to just bring echos. I posted some work I was proud of recently, and nothing.

I mean, I was working with someone elses scan, and I know I am a dabbler. I don't have much time since I lost my car. (I spend 14 hours a day doing 9 hours of paid work. The rest is lost time) But I thought it was a bad principle. I would have expected some, hey, that's good looking, how did you do that, and some yeah, but that's someone elses model, you just wrapped your own mesh around it. But nothing.

I think some of if is Renderosity cuts off all threads that aren't real recent, so it looks like there is nothing here.

My last thread was not more than last month, and it's gone now. This is the ONLY thread showing.

We need more activity, or we won't have any activity.


petes ( ) posted Tue, 05 May 2015 at 8:22 PM

Albert! Good to hear form you again! Yeah, it's pretty quite here, always good to hear from the old timers. I suppose it's a mix of people just went in other directions in life, and the other thing is there are a few real LW centric sites poking around. Rendo was always kinda big on LW in the forums..but more Poser in the Gallery, which limits the conversation of real LW topics.

Anyhow..be well buddy, thanks for dropping in!nAlways good to hear from you guys.

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


Warlock279 ( ) posted Wed, 06 May 2015 at 3:59 AM

Seems I must have refreshed the page about 25 times. Sorry 'bout that.

LOL, good to hear from you buddy! How's things?

Not too bad, not up to anything terribly exciting tho. With the forum so quiet, and nothing interesting of my own to post, I'm just the shadow of a tumble weed blowing thru most of the time. Without being one of THOSE people, most of the LW forums are nigh dead now. CGSociety's sees a few posts a month [if it still exists], mostly buying/selling licenses last I checked, SpinQuad's gone, SimplyLW, is slow as, its not just our little forum here. I think one of the reasons tho, and this applies across the board, is there's a lot less "I used [X] software package from start to finish." There's a lot more apps in everyone's pipeline these days. It used to be just the BIG studios that had multi-tool pipelines, the freelancers and hobbyists were using one almost package exclusively, but that's not the case as much anymore I don't think, there's a lot more specialization in software now. For example, what sane person [clearly I'm not] is doing character work these days without ZBrush? I'd guess the activity is down in a lot of the software suite specific forums [to some degree] while activity is likely up in general CG/Modeling forums.

The general CG work thing is foregone conclusion, most likely, but people keep warning me away from Lightwave for games. Why?

I primarily make game assets these days, and use LW as my foundation software. As a modeler for game assets, its more than sufficient, as Petes noted, it was once pretty much at the top, and its still a very solid modeler. Its great for UV mapping as well, if you use a set of 3rd tools, that are available free. There are a couple of shortcomings tho specific to game development. I'm two versions behind the current release of LW, from what I gather tho nothing has changed relevant to these issues.
The first one, is the one Petes touched on, baking and normal maps. You can bake normal naps in LW [with 3rd party plugins, one which is free set of shaders, or one which is an actual plug in for Modeler that's not free]. However, LW's baking tools can't properly pad UV islands so you'll spend a lot of time touching that stuff up or dealing with the mip mapping issues. The best route I've found, and its what a large portion of people creating game assets use anyway is xNormal, which is free. Its fantastic for baking, any and all your maps in one go [granted you can't use LW procedural textures in it], and I've had little trouble going to and from xNormal with LW. LW would be my last choice for baking these days.

So far as actually rendering normal maps in LW, don't waste your time. A million polygon mesh will likely render faster and more efficiently than your 15k tris game asset with a 2048² normal map applied to it. Not a show stopper tho as you're probably going to want tor render your assets in an actual engine like Unreal, Unity, or Marmoset anyway.

The last issue that springs to mind is the fact Modeler doesn't allow you to create or edit "smoothing groups." It can load them if they're on a mesh created in another app, but you can't actually work with them in Modeler. While that may seem like a big issue, its relatively small once you get the hang of breaking the smoothing by splitting the verts.manually [which is essentially what smoothing groups is doing behind the scenes anyway]. It can be a little tedious on really complex meshes, but I've been able to make it work, and I've not had any issues/complaints regarding that in meshes I've handed off.

My pipeline for game assets is...

  • Lightwave - Base mesh[es]/HighPoly HardSurface/Mechanical elements
  • Blender - HighPoly sculpting of organic elements
  • Lightwave - Retopo and UV the LowPoly mesh
  • xNormal - Bake Nomral/AO/Cavity and any other maps I need
  • GIMP - Texture painting
  • Marmoset - Rendering

If you were looking to get a job in a game studio, I'd say stick with Max/Maya that's what they're gonna want you trained on anyway, however if you're doing the generalist/freelance thing, and selling game assets on the side there's no reason LW can't do what you need with regards to game asset creation.

Core i7 950@3.02GHz | 12GB Corsair Dominator Ram@1600mHz | 2GB Geforce GTX 660


Lightwave | Blender | Marmoset | GIMP | Krita


petes ( ) posted Wed, 06 May 2015 at 6:58 AM

Great info Warlick. I'm not a game guy, so that was informative. Can you post some  renders of your assets here? What game did you do it for?

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


Spaceland ( ) posted Sun, 17 May 2015 at 1:02 PM

hi all,

I bought Lightwave 3d 11.6 but been so much busy and taking care of the kids that i kind of put my hobby to the side.

Soon i will have better times ahead so i can learn that beast.

Beside that i have Cinema 4D R15, Coreldraw X6, Moi 3D, 

[ Denis ]

| Coreldraw X6 | Moi v2 | Carrara 8.5 Pro | Cinema 4D R15 Prime | Lightwave 3D 11.6 |
| Intel i7-4700MQ | GeForce GTX 765M 2GB |


TalleyJC ( ) posted Mon, 18 May 2015 at 12:53 PM

With my kid, any free time I have winds up being a nap.


roboman ( ) posted Sun, 31 May 2015 at 8:05 PM

I'll just ask my questions about Lightwave here. Hope nobody minds.

I'm looking for a new software to go to, since Autodesk has lost their collective minds and is going subscription only, and am wondering about Lightwave. I hear things that aren't encouraging about the company, but the software seems solid. It's also not too pricey for a poor boy like me. Would it be a good fit for someone planning to do general CG work freelance, and making a little side money by selling game assets through various online stores.

The general CG work thing is foregone conclusion, most likely, but people keep warning me away from Lightwave for games. Why?

Well if they worn you about Lightwave and don't have a reason you have to question why and where that warning is coming from. Newtek built a computerized video editing system back when there were only ones for film and ones only major tv studios could afford. That is and always has been their main product. Lightwave exploded onto the market because it was the only pro level program on the market that cost less then a new car. Newtek doesn't do marketing well. They also haven't always made great business decisions. Others have taken over parts of their market and the high dollar programs have come down in price. Newtek still makes a great editing system and Lightwave is still a good software. The 3DStudio people and Maya people have been claiming Lightwave is on the edge of going out of business since the 90's. I've seen no signs of that. Newtek just keeps making hardware and software targeted at indie and small studios, and making a reasonable living doing that. Some people are all over the fact that the modeling and animation program aren't wrapped into one app, but even a large number of those people use a 3rd party modeling program.
Max targeted games hard, there are a lot of 3rd party tools for using Max with games. Maya ended up being the main high end, high dollar, program used for movies. Lots of people wanting to make games from movies had to come up with ways to use Maya models. So yes, the transition from Lightwave models to a game engine might require a 3rd party tool or two. I don't find Lightwave any harder to model with then Max Or Maya. There are 3rd party tools that are better then any of the animation programs I've used. I end up often using CAD programs (no not Autocad, mostly Solidworks and a few others). I like lightwave. It does what need it t and it doesn't get in my way much. Max seems like I'm starting over every time I'm away from it for more then a few weeks. Maya seems much the same, except I haven't used it enough to really say that.

That online software rental thing bothers me. A little over a year ago I was contacted about updating a video I did of a product to some new colors and details. I loaded up ver 7 of lightwave and had the finished animation out in a couple of days. If I had to I could load up my ver 1 of Max and redo some stuff. With the new software rental schema going back is likely to not be an option. One large worry for me is the software getting updated mid project and things not working quite the same. You can get a demo for free, give it a try. If it does what you want then it doesn't matter what any one else who hasn't used it says. I like Max, I just like Lightwave better. Mostly I think it's a personal choice, having to do with work flow and what works best for you.

Maybe my choise has to do with having liked the Amiga computer and the general feel and work flow of a program that started there.


SinnerSaint ( ) posted Wed, 01 July 2015 at 7:38 PM

I haven't used LIghtwave in probably 10 years or so, but looking around the Newtek site, I think it's still a solid program, especially for independent users, or small studios.  I use C4D exclusively now, both at work, and for personal use.  It's the only app besides LW that I got on with the very first time I used it.

I'm primarily a modeller at work, and do some texturing in the pipeline when they need me to, but that's not often.  I learned modelling in Lightwave, back in the late 90's.  I always felt back then, and still do today, that some of the best pure modellers in the world were using Lightwave and 3dsmax.  So when I landed my first job, it was a Max studio, and I was forced to learn that monstrosity of a software.  Yeah, it had some modelling tools that were useful, and it's modifiers seemed never ending, but compared to the interface of Lightwave, it felt like learning to fly the spaceshuttle.  Cinema, on the other hand, fit like a glove, and the modelling tools were more similar to Lightwave.

Wish there was more of you guys here.  Would make Renderosity a much more interesting place.


TalleyJC ( ) posted Thu, 02 July 2015 at 2:06 PM

Our activity, in my opinion fell off dramatically when CORE went sideways.  I think lightwave in general lost a lot of folks then.


petes ( ) posted Sun, 05 July 2015 at 8:29 PM

Meh  core was a twinkle in the eye and nothing more to me. Yeah it sounded promising, but I didn't bank on it. LW is still very solid I my book and does what I need it to. Hell I've seen amazing things done in Blender, and it's free. It all just comes down to what you like...and your talent. 

The he things that make Maya more robust are probably things that most LW users would not use unless part of a bigger studio  

lightwave, photoshop, oreo's...tools of the trade.


TalleyJC ( ) posted Wed, 08 July 2015 at 2:47 PM

Yea, What Pete Said....


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