First release of the new LightwaveX 2023 release

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1

Well, soon the New release from the LightwaveX team is here.
So no…it´s not dead yet.
The LightwaveX team also set´s them apart from the Newtek team in their philosophy regarding talking about their products, they talk about their roadmap and what they want to do quite transparently on youtube.

And for the record, it´s not that long ago they took over Lightwave from vizrt and newtek, so one has to keep that in mind for this first release from them.

The problem I have had for my interest in it, is the lack of a new forum site, since the newtek team shut down talks about lightwave on their forum and archived that stuff, while the only place for lightwave discussions is discord and facebook, I refuse both of those, but soon a new website forum should be in place.

some of the new features are listed below, and I must say what they have done is way more than the last updates from Newtek, at least from my point of view of what I would like to see adressed, some advancements on none destructive workflow in Layout, text creation that also can be used dynamicly with bullet and adjust the text after the simulation is done etc, animatable non destructive L-system, unreal bridge, chronosculpt included, turbulenceFD included.

TurbulenceFD will give lightwave a better fluid solution for gas volumes than native gas solver, and it will be much faster than the current blender fluids are and delivering better quality I think, it can´t be compared to Embergen…apart from that it has other advantages, image sequence fluid maps, and it can utilize all the fractal noise textures that are available in the large library set within native Lightwave.

You do not have to mess with two different apps for fluid simulating and rendering, you have the advantage of having full in scene context simulation with all other lightwave stuff, and you do not have to work with any camera matching workflow.

So that will be some of the advantage for TurbulenceFD being included in Lightwave as opposed to Embergen…though not as fast to simulate at all, but faster than current blender fluids.

Geometry Nodes ( similar but probably not yet unpar to blenders initially)
Though L-system is Waay easier to setup than the corresponding nodes needed to do it in blender, the L-system you just add the parametrics and animate it.

Octane for GPU rendering seem to now be included in the release, not sure how well that will work though, I have some issues when it comes to what fractals octane can access that prevents me from taking full use of those.

I will most likely not jump in to the price offering at 600 pounds, VAT included for me to update from Lightwave 2019.3 to 2023.
Partly the economic situation over here, and I always want to try a demo before deciding, and they don´t have that ready…so, it will have to wait for quite some time still.

But it definitely looks like the new team is advancing Lightwave faster than the old team, and it does so by adressing important things with a focus, unlike the other updates I felt was straying away to things they shouldn´t work on.

List…>

Final Call: Secure Your Pre-Release Pricing for LightWave3D 2023!

Dear Michael,

We’re thrilled to announce that our newly redesigned LightWave 3D website is about to go live! This marks a significant milestone for us and as we prepare for this exciting launch, we want to remind you that our exclusive pre-release offers will soon be coming to an end.

Act Now!

This is your golden opportunity to upgrade from ANY version of LightWave 3D and tap into our special promotions. The clock is ticking, and these offers won’t last much longer!

What’s New in LightWave 3D 2023?

Our 2023 upgrade is a game-changer, packed with innovative features and numerous quality-of-life enhancements to elevate your 3D creativity:

Procedural Geometry Nodes

Revolutionize your design process with our fully animatable, procedural geometry system inside the Layout, offering nodes like Boolean CSG, Extrude Geometry, L-System, and many more.

TurbulenceFD

Now a part of LightWave 3D, TurbulenceFD enhances your toolkit with a native voxel-based fluid dynamics plugin for creating stunning fire, smoke, and other fluid dynamic effects (also seamlessly works with Otoy’s Octane).

Unreal Engine 5.x Real-Time Bridge

Experience seamless, real-time communication from LightWave Layout to Unreal Engine 5.x, broadening your creative horizons in gaming, film, and virtual production.

Advanced Instancing Tools

Our new real-time brush (inside the instancing interface) allows for really easy placement of instances, boosting your scenes visual complexity while minimizing memory usage. This works on any multi poly surface - no setting up with UV’s… just paint straight on to any surface.

Dynamic Text Creation

Directly create & animate individual text characters in Layout, with comprehensive control over bevelling, alignment, surfacing, and more.

LightWave’s Octane plug In

Now included within LightWave 2023, the LightWave Octane plug in lets you link LightWave seamlessly with Otoy’s Octane GPU render engine. Giving the LightWave user access to one of the world’s best GPU render engines.

LightWave Pro Tools - User-Centric Workflow Enhancements

A suite of tools, developed by a user for users, (Formally OD Tools) now natively included within LightWave 2023. These span across all aspects of LightWave, including Modeler, Layout, and asset transfer functionalities.

ChronoSculpt (Separate stand-alone program included with LightWave)

Now part of this exciting 2023 bundle. Delve into the realm of sculpting and editing 3D meshes with an emphasis on time-based deformations and animations - perfect for freezing and adjusting physics calculations on geometry created in Bullet.

Extensive Workflow Improvements

Enjoy a smoother LightWave experience with enhancements like consolidated surfaces, a revamped node editor, custom color options, and many more.

The Countdown Has Begun!

The release you’ve been waiting for is just around the corner. Don’t miss out on this final chance to benefit from these incredible offers.

2

As a long time LW user, I’m happy that the program isn’t dead. However, I have zero interest in using it again for two reasons:

  1. It’s still split into 2 programs.
  2. Blender is just better.

Even if LW was merged into one complete program, I’d still be hard-pressed to even give it a second look, not to mention that I’d have to shell out $.

I don’t want this to turn into a Blender vs LW discussion, but I’m getting true sculpting, built-in compositing, real-time rendering, grease pencil, texture painting, true non-destructive modifiers, full-featured geometry nodes system, and so much more. Not to mention a whole host of addons for everything from archviz to character animation, all mostly for free. LW can’t beat all that any time soon.

3

no, it’s got a >lot< of catching up to do. I did do the early upgrade/switchover pricing, so i will check it out of course, and i’m sure i’ll do stuff in it. but will i give up Blender? certainly not. but i’ve never been a “one-software-to-do-it-all” kinda person. :slight_smile:

the improvements listed are quite a bit more than i expected, with the new team having it for such a relatively short time, and knowing that the previous team did not leave the codebase in a great state. i suspect we’ll see even more deeper changes for the following release, at which point we’ll have a better idea of where the new team will actually be taking LW.

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it´s not a question of what is the best software for figthing some kind of war.
For some Lightwave is out of the option completely and they can´recognize what it may be able do to for some who uses it, and only focus on their needs.

You can look at it generally as for the best worth, you can look at it individually for certain task, in the end if you start with the mindset of…which software is best, there will be pointless gobbling.

Personally I just want ot discuss various features individually mostly as to…what it actually does better or could be done better, for the sake of suggesting improvements in both software.

Turbulence FD I think was a bit tempting, I am not happy with the blender fluids, TFD utilzing the CPU will simulate much faster than blenders fluids, and it can utilize like 80 fractal noises in pretty much all channels, where blender is very limited to like 13 or so fractal noises.
TurbulenceFD also generates a better grid solving than blenders fluid, better quality I believe.

There is however a problem with TFD and that it uses the older legacy volumetric shader, that you can not use with the newer volumetric items in one single renderpass, and a very very slow multiple scatter rendering, so you would have to deal with that or convert to VDB and load and render without multiple volume bounce scatter, unless usig octane which would be the choice then of course, now that the plugin is inside of lightwave by default, but it will still need to rerun the simulation and convert for every change you do in the simulation unless they fix it to work directly with the newer volumetrics.

I do have embergen, but it requires camerat matching scaling issues and such, and not in scene context aware to other elements in the scene, it can not use image sequence as flow maps for the fluid emission, it only has One noise fractal as opposed to Lightwaves around 80 fractals.

So the TFD is probably the most interesting thing for me.
Unreal bridge, not sure blender has that going well, in Lightwave´s case it isn´t export, it´s an instant bridge.

The new geometric nodes are a step in the right direction, creating text dynamicly and none destructive, and changable even within a bullet dynamic simulation.

Lsystems also none destructively, easier to use than blenders node setups, but not as flexible an dopen as blenders geonodes that builds that up.

All OD tools are now a part of lightwave.

So it has a lot to catch up on still, but what they have done for this short time is Way more than the newtek team did, and they where throwing in things and in a direction that didn´t make sense, for me the new team seems to go in the right direction, when and if they solve the lack of modelling in layout, and boost the render engine, then I think they will be able to compete.

As I have said so many times before, I rather set things up in Lightwave layout than in blender, cameras, lights, objects, movement motion modifiers, easier, cleaner on the eye look of the UI as for structure and where things are, the structure of blenders UI and how you focus on things are not what attracts me.

painting instances directly without the need of a weightmap is good.
Chronosculpt will now be inside of Lightwave, which is something I said when the old team made it …it has to be inside of Lightwave, and now it is, production value.

Chronosculpt should not be compared to blender sculpting, blender sculpting which is awesome of course, but as for being a tool to adjust bullet simulations, and doing morphs, I think it may have an upper hand VS blender shape keys, easier to use …just sculpt and play along the timeline without messing with the various added morph keys in blender.

But for catching up, they for sure could use a proper sculpt tool, and texture paint tool.

The sculpting tool in blender cycles render, VDB volume rendering and evee to some degree, that attracts me.

So I need to fill in these thing in blender foremost…

-A fluid solution that is fast and with good quality.

  • Fractals, a few like 8 fractal textures for noise, compared to almost 80 in lightwave, that says it all if you work a lot with fractals, and some of them aren´t even accessable in all channels, unlike lightwave.

-The structure…I hate that it is so hard to focus on element properties of a tool, to find them, vertical labels making no sense, icons that are not very well defined, tools in odd places you just can´t get a grip on why it is placed where it is, and organize them yourself, seems not possible without coding, In lightwave I have my workspace to the left and top and in modeler to the bottom as well, I can create my own menus, tabs and re-arrange as I please, I can not do that in blender.

-Camera navigation and icon displays, Lightwave all the way, except for orbiting in perspective views.

-Windows file browser, I am not a fan of the blender file dialog, I constantly browse for files by entering a keyshortcut that represents the files first inital letter, I can´t do that in blender, you need to use the file serch requester and search for the whole name, it´s so much smoother with the windows file browser I think.

  • Lensflares…I need to get one addon for that, which have to be unpar with Lightwave´s built in lensflares.

It´s just that…except for sculpting and render speed…I just don´t like to work in blender, and I would rather do it in Lightwave if I had the same render speed, same cost for the software obviously and If I had the same rich feature set in Lightwave as blender have, otherwise for many setup worflows and a cleaner look in the UI, I prefer working in Lightwave…and some other stuff it has.

Color UI isn´t what I refer to though, just the structure, organization of it all, changing ui colors in Lightwave is one of it´s worse features…a real pain in the.
The main default color scheme however for some viewport elements mostly…is by default way better set in Lightwave( for me that is)

I constantly have to fight wireframe adjustments in blender in a way I do not find myself doing in blender, it´s simpler in lightwave and it just works for me, same with statistics panels.

5

Absolutely, I never downloaded the Lightwave 2020 demos, I thought it was Way to thin in feature set.

This release feels like it could have been at least 2 releases upon eachother in one release compared to the other ones, so I am definitely gonna download this Lightwave 2023 demo and try it out.

Apart from that, their philosophy of being transparent was the number one issue for me, the old team, we don´t say a squat, the new team, they hold youtube podcasts and discusses what they want to do, and what they are working on currently…that is the very incitament for trusting in what may be delivered, to get a roadmap.
So Andy Bishop is taking that seriously so far I think…a good thing.

Though the new release looks way more interesting now than the other releases, I still want to test drive what I am about to purchase, and I can not justify a preorder without that, even though I may get it cheaper now than then.

And the recession, inflation over here forces me to be really selective and careful with spending right now, maybe 2025 perhaps…after I have tested it and can see even more advances are coming up, and when the economics are catching up to a better place.

The early business model has been that of sharing stocks in Lightwave, so users becomes owner of it, I am not sure how that has worked out…maybe that gave them a some extra money resource to do a kickstart.

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6

I get that you want to discuss LW’s features in a Blender forum, but we already have Blender vs LW in other threads. Maybe just keep this one focused on LW and leave Blender out of it if you can (I’ll do the same, so forgive my first post). I know you hate Blender’s UI and all, as you’ve clearly stated here and on other forums, but perhaps just focus this thread on all the whiz bang new LW features and post how to improve Blender on an existing thread.

I personally don’t care about LW anymore, but I’ll be interested in seeing how it improves going forward.

7

Removed… not necessary to argue about it.

Any comparison of feature set I will do in the other threads, though I will probably wait til I have tested the new release.

8

Some videos highlighting some of the new stuff, though TFD is “old stuff” partly …but now part of/built in tothe Lightwave 3D software instead of as a plugin.
Simulation speed you can see at around 2:42 (GPU engine…unknown card)

Pro Geo Nodes…
None destructive animated booleans, and in the end some L-System (also node based)

Instance painter/placer brush in Layout…

9

They now have just launched the new lightwave account page, though they stated it was a bit of a premature release, so there may be errors and it may be working depending on what they update right now.

the website is now the same url as before, and use the same account username you may have had for purchasing and download your older lightwave versions…if you have one that is for old customers.
Do not mix it up with newteks lightwave forum user name unless that is the same that is.
here´s the link to check it´s features, gallery, community, product downloads and such.
A forum page is there…but I haven´t checked in there yet.

https://lightwave3d.com/

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Their website is a bit of a mixed bag. Still needs a lot of polishing. Why are they asking students for an administrative fee? That’s a sure-fire way to scare them away.

The Geo Nodes for booleans (arm demo) seems to run at a very low pace? That’s a low resolution mesh, and still Layout seems to be struggling.

The instance shot sequence: was that rendered in the native CPU-only based render engine? Hard to imagine, since it is very VERY slow.
So probably Octane?

Looking at LW 2023: the new team has a tremendous task of catching up to do ahead of them.

But it’s good to know that LightWave is still around. More competition is always great.

11

Indeed so, both Thomas Leitner and I wasn´t directly excited when we saw it, they need to really adress that, Then make it publicly accessable without the need to login.

There is no proper structure in the sections available, oki doki…it is mostly test perhaps and they released it pre-maturely, perhaps that wasn´t the intent.

I would almost state my amateur free temporary Lightwave blender forum is a tad better looking…

Forum | lightwave-forum (michaeli65.wixsite.com)

it´s not as clean and functional as the newtek Xforo forum platform, and it misses vital post images options ( which would ruin my free wix account storage anyway, but embedding images is possible but should be easier to do, otherwise it is easy for me to arrange sections.

I agree, the nodal geometry they are implementing seems to be a bit sluggish, but hard to tell if you haven´t tested it yourself.

The instance shot was probably rendered with Octane, the Octane plugin is now intergrated in to Lightwave by default.

As for website and content, documentation ( which Thomas wasn´t happy about to say the least)
And the forum, they need more time invested in that, not sure what format they can change with whatever platform they got, if it´s too limited, they need to consider to replace it completely, in worse case remove the forum board to an external proper forum board if it can´t be inserted on Lightwave3D.com

They will now have two different Gas fluid systems, the VDB gas solver which was awful in performance speed, and limited with texture forces only, and they now have TFD which will bring a decent GPU simulation speed, and nice looking fire and gas, but it will be yet another system that isn´t unified with bullet forces, or the other legacy standard wind forces…it uses TFD built in forces for that as well, and I doubt it will be able to advect particles, blenders fluids are unified with other forces, though too slow to simulate for any effective production value.

12

while the site certainly needs some work, i was happy to see not only the new, but all my old versions (well, only back to 8, but i have the previous in hard format back to 4) are there and dlable as well. wasn’t sure they were going to bother with that, given they are a seperate company entirely. :slight_smile:

13

I don´t see why that would be something to bother about as tedious, they bought lightwave from vizrt/newtek, and that should include all the accounts details And all it´s content, seems it would be more hazzle to go in to each account individually and remove certain old content.

I would rather Expect all content to follow along with what previously have been bought, licensing etc.

What I don´t like about it though, the license key isn´t there to download last time I checked, you have to request it by email, which is different from how it was before.

14

license key was there for me… well, a button to have it auto email it to you (you could see the key too, so could just cnp it into the license file if you remember how those were set up), which was mere moments before i got the ones for all 3 things.

15

That answer seems to suggest it wasn´t for me :slight_smile:
It´s not the same thing in terms of that the licence key number is there, but not the license key file.

And as you confirmed to what I wrote previously, you have to request it by mail, or go throw the hoops you described.

Please share your thoughts on the release and some of the new features if you have had the time to test it.

The new forums on their site is quite bad, from the looks of it to functionality, to what kind of forum sections the webmasters have started off with.

I doubt I will be anything near very active there, they need to fix it, or unplug and replace with a proper forum tool like Xenforo on the newtek site, right now it seems like a cheap for free forum, setup in blog mode, that is Not what we need right now.

16

under my account, there’s a downloads tab on the side, in that section, i see:

image

clicking on the Send to E-mail button emails me the license key file, if i don’t want to manually create one with the licence number (also shown on that page)

do you not see that under your account?

17

Of course I can see it in my account, that is why I said we have to request it by email, that I have been saying all along from the first post about it.

But The previous system had the full license key as a file in your account, which you just downloaded directly, without having to request for it by email.

Now…obviously you will not have one until you purchase it, but the old ones that are payed for and they should be there in my opinion, but they are not.

So it´s either a matter of they couldn´t get that transfered in one go, or it may be a security issue, change on policy for how they distribute the license key files.

The screenshot you show by the way, is neuron motion, that one I actually have the license key on I think, and chronosculpt, but not my current Lightwave 2019 lightwave version.

They also need to adress the version number, it is just displayed as 2010, 2015, and 2019 without the information on exactly which version extension number you you have, this was not the case in the newtek account.

I am glad they got rid of the physical usb dongle though, but that was already removed from the newtek days.

18

lol… so you have… for some reason, I was thinking that you were stating that you had to .contact the team. to request the license file, making it a lengthy and tedious thing to do, so this is just a misunderstanding on my part. :slight_smile: i apologoize. :slight_smile:

aye, agreed there, at least have a drop down choice for the download box to let me select which version/subversion of that lightwave i want to download.

aye, i had the option at one point in Newtek’s to “upgrade” to a non-dongle version (i think the last version they did, which i did not get, was the normal removal of dongle). i remember early on, the dongle was used on the parallel port… the one i was sent was a gender-bender, NOT a dongle… thank goodness the team got me a proper dongle while they worked out how the heck that happened. (had their serial code on it and all, like the dongles did… but not one bit of actual dongle there)
still shows my last dongle’s ID on the site. :smiley:

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