Lightwave 2018 Review

Is the new version of Lightwave worth a look after so many years in development? Can it give Blender a run for it’s money? Ironic, since Blender is free, but here you go anyway.

If Newtek succeeded wildly in anything with Lightwave 2018, it was making a release with what was needed to get the old guard (ie. veteran users) to stay put and even bring some departed users back (based on the activity in the Lightwave forum).

Of course, this suggests that they have not seen a noticeable gain in users coming from other apps, they will need to start bring bigger and more frequent releases (touching many areas) to do that.

The more choices on the market the better. Although, I won’t be buying LW 2018, I do hope they do better so that we have more choices and competition on the market. I certainly don’t want Autodesk to be the only player in town, nor just Blender.

there is still houdini, modo, c4d and a couple others…mostly niche products like z-brush(e.g. not full production environments)…LW was great…it just isn’t anymore…there is a good point in your video that it seems they are focused on rendering…meaning expecting the user to import a lot of assets…and for some studios that is enough…I’ll see how this turns out…I would never buy it again based on what I am seeing…but…I’ll still watch it :slight_smile:

The powers that be over at NT aren’t interested in taking chances, only playing it safe. Sure they updated the core mesh engine and the renderer, but where is the benefit right now? It doesn’t do anyone any good if you haven’t utilized it. Maybe the new under the hood stuff will pan out eventually, but as Bugzilla said in the video, the separate apps really drag LW down hard. As long as there are separate apps for modeling and rendering, I’ll never go back there.

well to be fair(I’m still not pleased with NT about LW 2018)a lot of studio work flow does involve moving around between a few packages.

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Other Software”