I have never touched lightwave, but I am guessing there are some users on here who used it before blender.
Quite obviously that there is…isn´t it?
Lino Grandi…lw developer.
Chris Jones
Richard Culver
Ztreem
And me
Just to name a few.
Ztreem…I can´t see how to move the origin with the newer move tools, only the 3d cursor.
Tried in both edit mode, and in object mode, and even that transform tools, tried alt, shifting…but all it does is moving the mesh, not the origin…you said it was possible to move the origin…and I suppose you didn´t actually mean move the 3d cursor?
Never mind…found it in the sidebar…check affect origin only…
Great, but still…awkward…I would have to remember unchecking it each time I need a transform of mesh elements as a whole…takes a lot of using I guess.
me too (ex Lightwave user). I was so hopeful about Core, and abandoned soon after that hope was dashed.
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Sure, I don’t know of anybody here.
The subject caught my attention. Brings back a memory, I recall some very impressive renders of Enterprise, they were from 2003. I was only fourteen at the time, when I saw them, I posted them on a forum to do with the series. Got some suspicious comments. One immediately knew, I couldn’t of made the render.
I am not sure now if, that software may of been used to model the ship and was used for animation.
I think most of the modeling in Early star trek (that was cgi) was modeled in Lightwave…I am not sure though…and at later point it may have changed.
Ron Thornton was a bit of a pioneer with modeling in lightwave for Babylon 5, the first tv series featuring cg spaceships, then he also worked on star trek as well I think.
Personally I think I could model a good ship in lightwave without much trouble, but that is partly because I know much more of the tools there than in blender.
Soon I need to dig in to blender hardops and see what that can do for me.
I agree…it’s a pretty new feature, but the UI is not ideal. It should be together with the other settings of the move/rotate tool. I don’t understand why it is hidden in an extra menu,it just increases the amount of clicks.
I would suggest you bind it to a shortcut or put it into the favourites menu.
I personally use the insert key (same as in Maya).
Hardops, Boxcutter and Meshmachine is a deadly combo for Hard Surface stuff. It’ll take a while until you have absorbed all the possible workflows and become comfortable with it, but it’s worth it. All the time you invest learning it, you’ll get back and then some. Its hard to quantify but learning all of this and using it made me 2x - 5x faster when it comes to modelling.
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Personally I think they should just introduce a move origin tool, and when choosing it…autosnapping is turned on and with options to choose center for an edge or center for a face selected and apply.
In lightwave …the transform tool to use…and just right click on any face, edge or point and click choose pivot and it´s done with the gizmo to rotate…not sure why Mikael (Ztreem) feels it is awkward to rotate pivot with that…I see no issues with it…but Mikael often finds that extra action you may need to do…so I´m sure he jumps in and corrects me 
there is a difference in Lightwave though…when you use the transform tool and pivot options…it is only for the editing of the mesh, not actually applying a true pivot to the mesh…when you want to rotate it with other tools, or when sending the mesh to layout.
Otherwise as I mentioned, just picking a face or a point and click center pivot does the job for placement movement.
That’s probably a more elegant solution. I thought about this before - other DCC’s also have this as dedicated tool like C4d for example. Maybe put some more options into it, like drop origin to ground level / lowest point of mesh, that would make many people happy i guess.
Drop origin to ground level…well that I want as well in blender with the same ease as in lightwave, there I use f3 to rest object on ground, or f2 to center at origin.
There´s got to be some shortcut or an option for that to setup in blender as well.
I think Modo has some of the better tools for dropping and snapping objects in a scene to other surfaces.
Just learning myself to snap objects to faces in blender…so that I got covered and with rotation along normal.
you can do that in lightwave with the align tool …but there it is applied directly with a snap…after selecting your face and target.
There is a pictrix free plugin that can move object segments on top of other objects segments surfaces in lightwave…it´s called sp move…which is great, but his plugin may be gone or stopped in development.
I could see myself renting LW for lets say 54€ every 6 months, just like modo indie,else it dosnt have nothing i feel would be special for buying at 1000€. Sadly LW is for game makers uninteresting with its aged modeler and for rendering there are better solutions.
I just feel sad for the people over there,beggin for an update, almost 2 decades and they still believe THE NEXT VERSION will be it! , just sad. And for those that have used lightwave for long it might be a good experience but my experience was just a horror,even navigating having to use trackball and most everything else plus it just felt so DOS,i was way more productive in silo in 5 minutes than in LW in one hour.
By the way there are a lot of Ex-LightWave users with Blender now.
But there was an even more profound exodus to XSI around 2008-2009. When it died that group forked off to Maya and Houdini and some came here.
Now more than even a few years ago, people are likely to default to Blender over other choices when the love affair ends with whatever app they were using.
It would be interesting to see the long list of Ex-LW folks here. It would be pretty long and revealing.
“But IK booster had some very strange quirks that made Character Animation never work or look right when it came to pinning. I did all of the tutorials back in the day and I was playing with it quite a lot. My conclusion was that it was not production ready. And the examples given by people like Larry Shultz even, god bless him, just looked off.”
I never could IK booster to work right. Drove me flipping nuts. Even the simple Octopus demo never worked. Larry Schultz, haven’t heard that name in ages. Used to sit a few seats over from him.
Can’t really say I’m Ex since I just got the upgrade to 2020. But my last upgrade was 2015 so maybe it was time. I did it more to keep up with LWCad than anything else.
I use Blender and Lightwave both. Really depends on what I’m trying to do. At the moment I’m having to make a forest fire and both programs are not really cutting it when it comes to large scale fire and smoke. I don’t mean setting a doughnut on fire but thousands of trees with billowing smoke and embers flying around. The may be what makes me break down and futz with Houdini.
I was an XSI user till Auto desk bought it. And I knew what was going to happen since I saw what they did to motion builder. I just built a new computer and refuse to put any Autodesk or Adobe products on it. I just don’t need all the bloat ware that comes with them
I was ex XSI, I moved to C4D for speed (logical.choice working in TV). Didnt knew Blender at the time. Its an excelent program with a few weird setups that are being worked out -changing parameters from multi selections is trickier. Im not a fan of cycles and I miss Xparticles, render queue, Takes and from XSI I miss render pass.
Thousands of trees on fire…probably a challenge in any software…unless breaking it up in render passes with simulations per tree mostly.
Embergen looks really nice though, seem to yield great results for the simulations and at a short time, so maybe try that with different settings for the fire on a couple of trees, save out as vdb, then load the different vdb´s in the scene.
for blender, unfortunately…I am not that fond of the mantaflow replace…I think it updates poorly and is hard to see any realtime feedback, updates isn´t working properly when moving forces or meshes.
So what did you try out for the fire in Lightwave…TurbulenceFD?
Thanks for the info I will look into that. My current plan it to just render out the fire and smoke and place them on Cards. Maybe have a few hero Fires close up. Blender needs a bit of work in the fire sim department. I can’t get a real alpha unless I use check on transparency in Eevee and render in Cycles. Then I have to bake a few frames of the sim to do a test render. Baking is fast at least. But can’t get a separate element for the Fire and smoke or Render just the fire with an Alpha etc. or teak just the smoke and not the fire shader etc.
Lightwave will always have a place in my heart because of Jimmy Neutron.
If they drop their price I might consider it just to support them but not really to learn…
Check out embergen, not sure if the render image sequences to flipbook would be something you could use, it can render out alpha, normal, flames, emission seperately by just checking what you want.
Only tested the very early demoversion, but you can not export vdb´s from it, neither flipbooks.
The vdbs for blender, not sure…I have to check the latest blender build …I think it now had the volume branch with vdb in it?
The question is how well it performs and if possible to clone vdb files decently without it going crazy in memory…may be an obstacle there.
Otherwise…Old ligthwave user and dev guy Lino Grandi showed some interesting stuff with the octane for blender version…when it comes to messing around with vdb´s.
Not only that…now octane has began a partnership with embergen…so worth a check perhaps.
And…
You have free vdb samples to download and try here…if you have the blender build for vdb´s…
Thanks I downloaded EmberGen and will take a look. I did some stuff with the Dynamite plugin ages ago where I had to match real world smoke and comp them together. Pretty sure that plugin is dead and gone though.