Lightwave 2020 released

[Ace_Dragon]

@MI65

Then again you got houdini, which now could expand on your fluids or volumetrics with cloudfx etc, also hair tools…and use that to export and import with the new vdb tools in blender.

then again, if you think Lightwave is too much of a hazzle to use for export and import to complement blender, you shouldn´t even look at houdini.

But then again…the kind of effects and complementary type is a bit more advanced than just a spline bridge modeling session…so there may be more value in it, but nevertheless it also requires more of a user to learn.

The difference between Lightwave and Houdini is apples and oranges really. Houdini can do special effects and procedural generation no other app. can do, and which can’t be worked around at all in Blender. I can get the same models without Lightwave’s tools meanwhile.

If you feel like you need to spend over 600 bucks to get some new rendering features and a basic no-frills version of Blender’s individual centers transform mode, then knock yourself out and upgrade to Lightwave 2020, but do consider whether it could be better spent on other products with more development activity, growing communities, and robust dev/user communication.

[MI65]

@Ace_Dragon

If you feel like you need to spend over 600 bucks to get some new rendering features and a basic no-frills version of Blender’s individual centers transform mode, then knock yourself out and upgrade to Lightwave 2020, but do consider whether it could be better spent on other products with more development activity, growing communities, and robust dev/user communication.

Why do you even bring this up, you clearly have no clue on what I have spoken about here.
I have made it very clear on newtek forums…which you probably do not follow, but also here that I will not upgrade to 2020 Lightwave, I will still use 2019 though.

Please aim the question to “someone” and not me in such case.

And Of course, the development pace, the community growing is also a part of it, though I have to say…many in these forums seems so offensive to a level I haven´t even seen in lightwave forums, even though there are some there as well …so that is not very encouring.

It´s just like there perhaps are so many more youngsters in this forum…kids that can´t afford a commercial software that may have the …flame war against other software mentality.

Sure …they are different, but this was with the notion that houdini is double up harder to learn than lightwave.

Of course you can get the same models without lightwave, just as I can get the same models in ligtwave without blender, that is not the point, the point is the workaround you have to do to get a model operation done, and you simply can not perform the bridge bezier and some of that nice bending poly connection, not with the blender carve curve addon even.

And manually bridging and correcting the bridge would take considerably longer time…especially considering when you just add several bridges wich keeps the bridge settings when running the command on several areas.

And agreed, that action center model enhancement was thin, and not working properly either…not very motivating for an upgrade.

[Ace_Dragon]

@MI65

And manually bridging and correcting the bridge would take considerably longer time…especially considering when you just add several bridges wich keeps the bridge settings when running the command on several areas.

The Blender bridge tool can make multiple segments and do some basic bending, and you can do further bends with proportional editing (with or without individual centers active and connected mode).

You can do some other things with the bridge tool that comes with the bundled Looptools addon, but unless you need to make cursive writing or excessive amounts of loopy geometry, you might not save that much time (if at all) doing the import/export dance whenever you need to bridge two groups of faces.

[MI65]

Sorry Ace_Dragon, but you do not know what you are talking about, have you tried the artsphere bezier bridge tool? otherwise I need to record it for you…you simply can not do those things in blender, the so called bends is merely profile curving within the polygon segments, which further can be changed if you go to move with proportional editing, in no way do you have a bezier spline curve between these face elements that you can adjust per node, or add new new nodes or delete nodes,

See image and the orange spline within the bridged segments, that one I can change however I see fit, and this within a bridge tool that merges the polys, it also has a direct switch to use as poly or subpatch while working with it.

The blender bridge tool can not do anything close to this artsphere plugin, it has however a much nicer of control for the taper profile, but that is of lesser importance.

And you are wrong…since you are making the wrong conclusions in the first place, " whenever you need to bridge two groups of faces as you conclude, it´s not about bridging two groups of faces…it is about doing that with full splin control to shape the bridge in curves and even loops.

And as I said, I have tried this carve addon with curve primitives to snap curves to faces, which is more powerful in other circumstances for other types of models, but it can not do that with the cleanest geometry and needs to be joined and remeshed, so it doesn´´ work on a single mesh and fusing in one action …with the same matching geometry.

right click on the spline adds a new node knot controller to adjust the spline bridge curving, and ctrl right click on it removes it, that is manual control, then you can set the segments in the numeric panel as well.

Please do not go in to how curves is more powerful in blender as non destructive(I regognize that for the eventuallity you need it to be that) but thats also completely different thing.

But to conclude, you simply can not do this model operation as smoothly as lightwave does it, you have to workaround it…and I think it will take quite a bit more time to do that if you do a lot of these on many faces on a mesh.

So far none has been able to showcase any addon or toolset that can do the same in blender, which means anyone is free to correct me if I am wrong.

[Ace_Dragon]

Blender can make that model too, it might take more steps and it might be a little more manual, but it can be done without resorting to curves. Anyone who thinks this is impossible to make with Blender has obviously not given much effort to explore the modeling toolset that comes with Blender (which includes the ones in bundled addons like Looptools).

[MI65]

@Ace_Dragon

Blender can make that model too, it might take more steps and it might be a little more manual, but it can be done without resorting to curves. Anyone who thinks this is impossible to make with Blender has obviously not given much effort to explore the modeling toolset that comes with Blender (which includes the ones in bundled addons like Looptools).

But why do you see it as…it can be made in blender to…the final result yes, but not with the same speed and control…that is the whole point.

The loop tools, I coulnd´t see anything that can do the same in there.

[MI65]

And what if you had gotten someone to make this tool …to work just the same in blender, would you persist stubbornly that you do not need it, and would never use it…if you did, nothing in that mental state could possibly make any sense.

[Ace_Dragon]

@MI65

The loop tools, I coulnd´t see anything that can do the same in there.

Maybe not, but if you make the thing anyway and it looks a little rough, you can use its relax tool to smooth the 4 loops into smooth curves without destroying the shape (which has helped me polish up models in many scenes).

@MI65

And what if you had gotten someone to make this tool …to work just the same in blender, would you persist stubbornly that you do not need it

I would use it if it wound up bundled with Blender, but the point I was making is that I would not plunk down over 1000 bucks just to use the thing. I know of the whole mental exercise of what if Lightwave was available for free, but there’s little to no chance of that happening anyway (as I don’t see any indication of VizRT being interested in free and/or open products).

[MI65]

Again you do not pay 1000 bucks for just one thing, lightwave can do so much more…of course that would be insane if you approach it that way as an incite.

But agreed, many blender users do not pay for software, can´t even consider it…despite which one it would be, since blender is free and can do so much…and yes, part of it being free and that it can do so much nowadays is a little of the motivation for me to start using it more.

I do not have to pay anything more right now for lightwave…or the upcoming years, and will not do so unless I see significant changes and features etc that I wouldn´t be able to do with blender.

And no…I do not think it will ever be free either.

And for me who likes to use the volumetrics for Lightwave, I still feel it is easier faster to set some of that stuff up, but if I would discuss that…I am afraid a certain crusader in here would jump in with silly remarks.

The volumetrics in Lightwave works pretty much directly out of the bat …with a few changes as opposed to what you have to setup with meshes and nodes for falloff, texture density in blender for the kind of volumetrics I am talking about.

It is probably completely out of the question since You can´t consider paying…but there is a free trial that can work fully including using the spline bridge in modeler to try it out…but I think it would be of no use other than to check it out, so better to wait for my youtube recording of it…which may or may not be able to serve as a rough idea development sketch for any talented blender coder.

Then we got the whole UI looks and structure, Ivé said it before…I generally prefer Lightwaves structure and clean looks, despite blender having a flashier more customizable UI in terms of color and scaling of it.

You guys who have a desire to attack me as a promoter or defender of lightwave, make no mistake…I think blender is absolutely awesome…in many aspects…and that is why I try and shift focus, but not leaving the other tool completely, at least not yet.

[MI65]

I also mentioned all the great lightwave procedurals, all I get suggested from the blender community, is compiled nodes from a couple of basics nodes, nestled in a huge network with various settings…to perform a certain fractal look which often lightwave has in one single fractal texture…especially love all the dpont rman collection textures, and all those and lightwaves native fractals can of course be setup in just as advance node mess with functional control as in blender…except you do not really need to.

I think the octane blender version has a bit more textures that emulates some of those, I have the free one lying around, but not using it much…so I need to take a look at that.

Also to keep in mind, as far as I know of, blenders ability to plug in procedural texture in almost any channel …seem much more limited than what I feel I can do in Lightwave, displacement nodes, motion channels, particle velocity etc…I could be wrong, but that is the impression I get.

I miss the stacking of procedural texturing in displacement…that workflow which I can do so nicely in lightwave with alpha mode, mixing with gradients.

Not sure if there is a way to override the modifier stack way of adding procedural textures layered on top of eachother, instead of having to add modifiers all the time…I may be missing some knowledge around that though…any input is welcome.

[Jeric_Synergy]

@Herbert123

And if you hover over the button area and hold down the CTRL button while using the middle mouse button, it will allow you to seamlessly scale the buttons.

LOL, in true Blender.org fashion, they choose the least intuitive direction* for the mouse to activate this function. It’s downright eerie.

*pour moi.

[Richard_Culver]

I do like the texture support in Layout how you can plug it in at different points. But then LightWave has another way of approaching everything. So it does not directly cross over to Blender in all cases.

Everything nodes is going to change this up even more.

But one thing that does work in a similar way to LightWave are the modifiers in Graph Editor.

And you can access these features in a similar way to LightWave by turning on animation for a channel. Then using a modifier. I think LightWave’s graph editor capabilities here are a bit more extensive. But it is something to be aware of if you are not already.

[MI65]

Yes…I really need to set some time away for learning the graph editor and motions in blender.
I thought it had some of that …sure, from what I can see now though…except that I think it is graphicly more pleasing perhaps than Lightwaves graph editor, at first glance…it seems way more limited than lightwaves regarding noise functions and such in this f-modifier, it´s just a noise.

will have to look at the audio functions as well to drive displacements and motions if possible.
In lightwave you have more types of modifiers to choose from metalinking, channel follower, audio channel, expression, cycler, noise, oscillator, proximity… (great to use when moving nulls to light up a stage with lights placed with distance and you want to trigger them)

But that´s just the modifiers, one of lightwaves strengths is the ease of access to procedural textures, same here you add it in textured channel, and then you could stack up almost all your procedural layers in that texture channels, and with a checkbox only switch between whichever fractal you want…and that´s a lot…you can see a part of the textures available, not all of them, the screen can´t cover them all…as for blender you can probably count them with a few fingers.

I would for instance want fractal textures to push the velocity of particles in blender, haven´t looked in to that yet though…perhaps possible.
That´s how I used to push

lw particles and used sprites to render of course…

Somehow I have a recalling of me already talked about this though.

Ive seen some nice stuff with animation nodes in blender, will surely have to take a look at that as well.
One blender showcaser on youtube praised blender for being able to move channels up and down in the graph editor, not all programs can appearantly, lightwave can do that though, just click and grab and move it up or down where you need the channel in your list.

I said here above that one of lightwave´s strengths is the easy acess of procedural textures, still is to some extent…and praised by me for having many to choose from…

That said…the 2019-2020 workflow is screwing around with this previously easy access, both for principled materials and displacements making it harder to work with it all was easier to access in older lightwave, and the legacy standard material…which is still there though.

All this that I have been talking about now though…it isn´t exactly on topic…the topic lives and often goes off topic to some degrees, but we are not talking about lightwave 2020 much, and since I am not even motivated to try 2020 out …not for quite a while, I do not have much to say about this threads main topic.

[Richard_Culver]

Yeah, its OK. Doesn’t matte much I suppose.

But to your post. Yeah brings back some memories. I mean, there are some cool things here and there. I still think that LightWave has its strength in a rendering and VXF pipeline. Certainly no one wants to hear that. Because all of the talk is about LightWave behind the curve on everything else. So kind of like, what is the point? Other render solutions and so on…

Well here is a thought. LightWave is never going to get those other things. Ever. So why continue to cry about it? And it will be the undoing of LightWave as a tool for sure. Eventually.

So what would be the profile of someone who wanted to buy LightWave now?

Well, it would be someone who wanted to flat out own a tool that they could use to produce some very cool vfx shots easily. A fairly modern render solution. Unlimited render nodes and so on.

There is an attraction to it for sure. I don’t think it would be a hand full of small things in Modeler or whatever. It would have to be a pipeline solution.

What is the profile of someone bailing on LightWave? Someone who for whatever reason believed NewTek would fix “all those things”. And finally realizes it ain’t gonna happen. Ever. And the grass is greener. See ya!

I can’t see NewTek doing anything more than slight improvements to the render pipeline. Look to 2021 to be more of the same if it even lasts that long which is questionable. But that is the only market they have and the only resources they have are to simply improve it.

But more people will bail. Who knows how many seats they sell every year? Who knows what those numbers really are?

But here is one thing you can bank on. None of the high profile clients and studios still using LightWave are waiting with bated breath for a better animation pipeline and modeling. They aren’t using LightWave primarily for that. And they haven’t been for decades. So what is the difference really?

[MI65]

I think we would have an endless debate wether or not there is the slightest chance modeling tools will arrive or not, you are utterly convinced it´s not going to happen ever, I myself am not that convinced as you are.

That said…I can not wait around for it…if it happens, great…I will start keeping track of lightwave again even more perhaps, if it´s not happening within the next years…then I can take comfort in that I may have done the right thing right now to start doubt their direction on that…so this release was the kind of deadline where I wanted to see proof of modeling tools in layout…and since I can´t see anything of it…my choice to work more with blender is made.

But still…I am not the one that will promise to jump from the eiffel tower without any bungy jump rope or parachute…if suddenly lightwave get´s modeling tools …within our lifetime.

As for profiles of bailers and buyers…don´t know really, it doesn´t really interest me to speculate around that really.

I´m not sure if you are the right one to ask this about?..to help me out and adapt to blender more?
I was thinking of weight map based animations, and I am refering to fertilizer and dp growth in lightwave, I have searched briefly on google and youtube …but didn´t get any direct results yielding the task I look for…may have to dig deeper, but then again…a quick question on it here for you.

Is there a tool for that in blender to grow tentacles etc the similar way? for dp growth…if you use the dp verdure tree creation tools in lightwave modeler, it also sets up a weightmap automaticly…you just add this growth modifier in layout and animate with envelopes

And theres also a weight plugin called outward weightmap…where you select origin points and then it will grow the weightmap outwards from that…and you can then either use fertilizer or dp growth to expand that.

Anything similar in blender? or do we have to approach it in another way in blender?

[Richard_Culver]

That is not something I have followed too much. So I am probably not the right person to ask.

[MI65]

Thats ok Richard,
ztreem usually stalks me, and does so in the nicest way by providing alternatives…so perhaps.

if not suggested within two days, Ill do my own research …some googling, but perhaps also trying blender out on the task at hand…that can actually be good for learning…and how you learn, that´s the approach I often took when dealing with lightwave issues…sort of challenging to find the solution yourself without having it all served…sometimes that is:)

There are other stuff I also need to go through, like metalinking, need to dive deeper in to dynamics etch, I am actually more concerned…or interested in that part than modeling, except for that I love the sculpting tools and the skin modifiers, but not so much the other modeling tools…though I yet have to work with hardops etc.

Also the partmove stuff with nodal displacement…from lightwave stuff and see if blender does it better, need to install animation nodes first though, ivé seen some interesting plexus animations and live noding so to speak that is promising and interesting.

Bryphi was/is the master at those node displacement and nodal motion stuff…for lightwave.
Did mess around with the simpler stuff quite a while ago, I am getting a feeling that blenders tools now may be much better though…but not sure.

video from 2014…not sure you could do that with blender at that time though.

[Safetyman]

Speaking in general here… not to anyone specifically - can we not point out the shortcomings of Blender’s such and such tool/functionality compared to LW? I think it’s pointless to make such comparisons and there are probably other threads for that. Let’s just bash LW here instead (kidding).

Consider this: The thing I love about Blender is that if you want some tool or function that Blender doesn’t have you can make it yourself, even if you are not a programmer. Blender has built-in python templates and the community here will help you fill in the blanks. Assuming of course it doesn’t already exist. Many times I’ve wanted some addon, did a Google search, and viola! It has already been done.

There are numerous tools and functions that LW has that Blender doesn’t and vice versa, so to make such comparisons is a waste of thread space. Back on your heads.

[anon63258026]

@Safetyman

Consider this: The thing I love about Blender is that if you want some tool or function that Blender doesn’t have you can make it yourself, even if you are not a programmer. Blender has built-in python templates and the community here will help you fill in the blanks. Assuming of course it doesn’t already exist. Many times I’ve wanted some addon, did a Google search, and viola! It has already been done.

A good point.

The extensibility of Blender is a killer feature in itself. I don’t know how I’d get by without Sverchok Nodes Addon these days. There’s no equivalent like that in LW and if I were tasked with creating growing tentacles, which was one of the questions asked above, I’d start with Sverchok and do it all procedurally.

My advice would be to embrace the power of Animation Nodes combined with Sverchok or Sorcar and not look back.

[MI65]

Is there the same emperers clothes state of mind you want to have here as is existent in lightwave forums? what´s the point of not pointing out flaws and not suggest how to do it better? would that make blender a better tool to use…just for the sake of keeping the piece?

I agree with you on learning python though, need to dig in to that very soon.