Discuss LightWave workflows and LightWave/Blender comparisions here

[Richard_Culver]

Which way are you trying to go? In Blender or in LightWave?

Wouldn’t we use Luxigons in LightWave to clone to a vertex or face?

You mentioned options that are more sophisticated, but I mean that would be more of a direct relation to instancing on points or faces.

At any rate, it is a bit of an abstract discussion for me until we define the specific effect you are looking for, because there are many options and variables to play with in Blender. Drivers, Shared actions, Group Instances, and probably a lot more including Animation Nodes and the new Geometry Nodes. Probably half a dozen things I don’t know what would all contribute to the final result.

So if we started with a scenario. Maybe something you are doing in LightWave you want to see in Blender as far as a light effect, rig or whatever.

[MI65]

Can´t specify it properly really, just experimenting of how flexible it would be.
Luxigons is a bit different, It´s Not applied by vertices in modeler, but polygon normals.

besides, you can´t use that method for particles in a scene in lightwave, and as mentioned…not able to put it on points makes it less useful in some cases, and I don´t think it would follow displacements either.

using nodal motion cloning (bryphi77) has some tutorials on that on youtube, is one way to go, or fx linking.

Just learnt a bit about the cloning of lights now in blender, converting to instances to real lights,(ctrl-a) so each light per vertices cloned can be accessed (which it can´t if just instanced)

However, trying to change intensity or color will still have the instance connection …so if you change on one light no matter which you choose, all the others will change the same, so you would need to make each light a single user , in display numbers of users of this data and click on the number to make a single user copy, which will allow for changing colors and intensity per light.

So far I got that covered and solved.

Further experiments would be to control light color and perhaps intensity en masse, by using fractals or other nodal settings, but it would need to adress all lights at once by a fractal map to give variance to all lights based on that map, or proximity to other objects.

hard to describe real scenarios since it´s experimental motion graphics more of than a true live case scenario.

I will try and give you some descriptions later when I know how to formulate it.

One potentional candidate would be a huge U.F.O over devils tower with a lot of color lights , changing colors when the lights are moving around the ship, or based on sound/music.

Love how sweet it is to use volumetric background in eeve and have point lights shimmer in realtime, if set right the volumetrics is hardly visible but only serving as bloom glow for the lights, of course you could try with instancing emission surfaces and bloom instead, but that is a bit different.

so what I kind of would like to do now is simply to control each lights color, but not having to individually go in and do that, but instead being able to control each light´s color by a map, or proximity or similar, perhaps not possible yet.
The new animation or geometry nodes I haven´t checked up that much on though.

It all starts with a cube apparently, like a true blender philosophy/practice

…

[Ztreem]

It’s possible but you need to use Cycles at the moment, as far as I know.

[MI65]

Yes, thanks.
No nodal light control in eevee unfortunately.

bummer since it´s kind of the realtime feedback response I wanted when messing with volumetric lights.
how long did it take for you to refine that volumetric render?

[MI65]

I also need to check out the global background scatter in blender more in depth, currently it is not working as I expect it should do, it covers all background images in cycles, while not with eevee.

global scattering is working more as it should in Lightwave as well and backdrops, but I am sure I have missed some settings…must have.

[MI65]

A thing to discuss…

From what I can see in response, lightwave is seemingly much much faster to solve the quality in the global scattering, and also in the volume item, vs cube and volumetric materials in blender.

Which is kind of strange considering I employ the GPU in blender, and in Lightwave the CPU that normally does a crappy job of iterating GI or vdb and smoke materials.

Thanks for the nodal screenshots, it helped and I got that working as it should in cycles anyway, but the problem is the global scattering, and that I can´t have it in realtime as with eevee.

[Ztreem]

They are two different renders based on different techniques so not that strange. It all comes down to render settings and quality needs. This rendered in around 10 sec in viewport with optix denoiser (Quadro P5000), seems ok to me. Cycles is not known for fast volumetrics but it will surely be faster when CyclesX is ready. Blender is at least getting updates.

[Ztreem]

I tested a reversed workaround and tried to add color to eevee lights in world shader nodes instead. It kind of works but it will not save you any time as you have to add every lights transform one by one. It was a fun exercise nevertheless.

[MI65]

Your quadro vs my GTX 1080, hard to evaluate.
will have to check and see how I could lower the settings in cycles.
As far as I can tell there isn´t much settings you can change.

For global scattering
In blender there is no per light volumetric control, you have step size for the global volumetrics, and then the render sample settings, apart from that to choose no GI on the lighting, and perhaps some light clamping.

In lightwave there is no step size for the Global volumetric scattering, it´s per light a voluemtric quality control.

Two problems, currently Lightwave gives me faster iterations in vpr for volumetrics, I do not seem to be able to match that speed in blender…this is now, but yes…it may also be the end of things.

the global scattering seems to block out any backdrop image in blender, while the global scattering in Lightwave doesn´t.

Then we got the volume items/volumetric materials on objects.
here they seem to be more the same, where the volumetric material on a cube will not block out the backdrop, even if it covers the scene a lot…of course low density required, on the background volumetrics that is the problem in blender.

Wether or not a cube at a fairly large scale with volume scatter or principled material is faster than Lightwaves nulls, volume item …hard to say, on those subjects it will be harder to evaluate since there are more controls that affects all that.

Cycles x …yes, maybe…it´s not able to do volumetrics yet though I think?

[Ztreem]

GTX 1080 and Quadro P5000 is kind of equal in performance.

Regarding the background with world volumetrics, I used this setup.

[MI65]

Thank´s Mikael,
I don´t have much time to test more though these upcoming days.

[MI65]

OD tools copy and paste from and to external python plugins fails to install on blender 3.4.0

Installed it on 3.3. at this path ,and it works okay, the plugin shows up in the menu and is working as it should.
C:\Program\blender-3.3.2-candidate+v33.9f5a2d87881f-windows.amd64-release\3.3\scripts\addons

So this one above works as it should for that version.

In blender 3.4 though, I get installation errors saying it is in the addon search path…which is the same as below…which is a bit confusing, why is it protesting about the very same folder? path I put the plugin in to?

C:\Program\blender-3.4.0-alpha+master.638bf05a23e1-windows.amd64-release\3.4\scripts\addons

Tim parsons is using it and it works with 3.4.1, not sure if it is something wrong with 3.4.0?

Screenshots…

[MI65]

This is now solved on my system, not sure why it suddenly worked, had to open and close blender several times before OD tools suddenly appeared to be in there in the menu.
Maybe some cache/config settings that aren´t uppdating properly until saving and closing blender.

The path for the plugin that finally worked is…