Most software… Yay new feature!
with LW it’s Yay it’s still alive!
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You would think that if the old fantastic and the very best developers of Lightwave, was about to leave and starth their coding to Modo, and making something that Lightwave should be in the future according to them…that, All Lightwavers would move to modo…many did …and many did not, including me.
Apart from having a poor demo trial method, I feltl modo to be too clunky for my taste, and I loathed the shader tree and some structural UI things.
I would like to try it out some more though in the future, but it´s short demotrial isn´t for me, I think Lightwave differs there in terms that it goes in to discovery mode, which modo don´t…and you have to wait for the next bigger release.
I rather keep on investing in using blender than go modo actually, so that is also a part of it, and perhaps also houdini indie, together with Lightwave…blender and houdini I still want to learn much more about, and while doing so…I will probably not update the first Lightwave 2020 version, unless it really has something exciting…but I reckon it will take som more time than 2020 to get to that point.
/Prom
with LW it’s Yay it’s still alive!
How can you be that negative 
Your LightWave related post makes you win the LightWave nagging Marathon with 5 miles.
Why the drama?
No one comes close. Hey, we all bash LightWave from time to time, but at your end, Why the CONSTANT bashing?
It is peculiar, almost funny.
Remarkable though, there are some guys willing to pay for a UI tool that overcomes Lightwaves lacking of a flexible UI with windows docking, scaling and change of colors, that put´s some perspective on that there will still be people also investing in Lightwave.
That said, I would probably…Probably never invest in this UI tool…since I think this should be natively in Lightwave, now it isn´t …but I rather leave lightwave if I would be so upset with it not getting any UI attention in the upcoming releases…maybe not this next release, but later…rather than purchasing a plugin which I feel is expensive in relation to what should be in a native software.
39,95 euros
https://sites.google.com/view/lwui/home
I can´t complain about Papou making this possible, and he deserves credit for it, even though I think his pricetag isn´t what I can accept, and any complaints should to to the native LW team for not having adressed these issues within Lightwave.
I think I foremost however lacks the multi editing of channel values, constantly having to enter the same value 3 times when you want uniform change of some parameters is tiresome, Matt Gorner was aware of that…and said it required some template to be implemented, can´t recall what though.
For this UI from papou, I honestly don´t think it is worthwile, either it will have low sales…and also the lightwave team will implement things for themself during the years…which makes it not worthwile.
I honestly think newtek should pay him out real good, and implement it natively as a first stage…but maintaining the same price, then they at least have had a development of it to some degree with a third person resource, in the end it will raise the value of Native lightwave, but hardly not if it is a third party plugin that is commercial.
Just to Add,
Yes I got Blender installed,
Yes, Blender is Great.
Most here don’t know you are a legend of old-school standing in the LW community so your thoughts aren’t placed here casually. Peace out. I get it.
It’s just an observation Erikals not meant to be positive or negative. Lw development is silent, people make excuses and say oh that must mean they’re hard at work. They delay a release and people say oh they must be fixung bugs. They announce a release coming soon and people say see, see LW is alive and doing well.
And it’s the same every cycle. All is forgiven once a new release is out. It’s OK NT that you went 2 years of silence before 2018, as long as you’re still alive thats all that matters. Don’t you think people in the LW community should maybe hope for more by now instead of justifying the poor communication, direction or lack of development in things like Modeler?
I’m personally looking forward to see what new stuff they might have for rendering. I also hope there is at least some development on the modeler front as well.
That almost 3 year gap between 2015 & 2018 still makes me shake my head looking back at that. It was bad even from a business perspective.
True, but they said it was a conscious decision they knew would have consequences. Look for some of Steve Bowie’s comments on this. And he reported at the time they decided the benefit of going silent about what happened outweighed those of revealing it.
Lack of a release also happened in this time and as you say, could not have been good for business.
However, do the math. in 2019 they emerge with a sale to Vsrt. You go back two years from that, a good reasonable amount of time to prepare for a sale and/or go through the motions of a deal. It does not happen overnight.
So with these actions and no mention of what new plans would be for LightWave, it tells you where their priority lies.
And it is not with the expansion of the user base of LightWave or caring at all for growing it as a product.
Their focus is on real time video for the mid to low-end broadcast market. Not high-end visual effects for film which is where LightWave was 15 years ago.
Lightwave is the only app where an indie version would make sense for a moderate price of 199,99$
I dont know its past nor every cool feature it might have deep inside, i just know that when i open it, i feel a puke feeling and get nightmares that i am working in DOS again.
It just look and feel awful,weird,unintuitive and the best, newtek cant manage to bring DISC ROTATION into modeler, what a joke Lightwave has become.
While everything you said is true you have to remember many people have a great amount of affection for LW as it gave many of us a start. I imagine most of the LW brigade are hobbyists and former pros doing the nostalgia thing and they are prepared to overlook the glaringly obvious issues it has. As you can see from the thread owning LW is also a reason to join a forum and talk endlessly about it and reminisce about the good ol’ days.
It’s ridiculously over priced for what it is and there seems to be more work going into Blender on a daily basis than a year of updates for LW. That should tell the user base all they need to know.
I have great memories of LW, but now it’s like watching an old friend die.
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The irony is. Even if you don’t like Modo, that is where LightWave went. And it is a taboo subject that people at NewTek don’t like to talk about. Like Core. Like Rob Powers leaving. Like going silent for two years. Like saying nothing ever again and just releasing LightWave once a year.
So for me it is simply like a division. One fork of the road was LightWave that became Modo. Like it or not but it thrived and prospered. The other fork remained as LightWave and died a slow death.
LightWave was only a moniker after that. More like a misnomer and a false idea it could continue to live and becomes something. A lie perpetrated by the owners who were left with the name and 10 years of useless code. But a userbase who they knew would spend money as long as they could keep up the charade.
The honest thing for NewTek to do would be to simply sell the name for as much as they can and publicly lay it to rest. As it is now they are just stringing people along on a surreal trail of mystery.
I say they owe it to the community to simply get honest and stop giving people false hope, give it an EOL date and move on.
Wind River … 2017
Iron Man … 2008
The Big Bang Theory
Green Book … 2018
Iron Sky … 2012
The Walking Dead
Batman Ninja … 2018
+200 games / movies / series i’d say LightWave is doing alright,
sure, it would be nice to see it at the very top again.
Yeah I know it is amazing how much of a footprint that LightWave still has in the VFX industry.
For those that did not live it. And I am sure there are many here. LightWave was basically to us then, what Blender is now. In a very similar way.
It was how a lot of people got into the VFX industry. And it was a thriving growing and expanding line of work. Basically LightWave carved out a place in the industry.
And Blender, in its own way has done to the 3D software industry what LightWave did to the VFX industry. It was sort of the equalizer. And it meant so many people could enter who would never have been able to before. Blender has done the same for a lot of people.
However. LightWave’s days are over when you consider that it has no modern tools and workflows to attract new artists in the way apps like Blender and Houdini or even Modo.
For LightWave to survive it needed to have transparency and show young people where it was going and keep the long time users inspired. Because it was going to take a long time for those tools to come. And just when it looked like we were going to see some of that transparency they shut it all down.
So it is not really a matter of is it still being used. It is vital to any software to attract new young users and the next gen of artists. That is the relm of Blender now. It was once the relm of LightWave and then Maya. And Maya now even still rules. But LightWave is not in the picture at all. It is all but forgotten. Just quietly churning out product in the background while NewTek milks what it can from those old users.
Nothing can survive long without a lifeline from young users.
And that reality makes me even more angry at NewTek. And shows how strong LightWave was, that it has taken so long to kill it off. And it seems from their actions that this is the intent.
If it walks like a duck as they say…
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Anywhere other than the LW community that would be satire @erikals. You forgot Avatar!
I hope more of the LW community stray over here to this thread and while they’re here I urge them to take a look at https://developer.blender.org/ and look at the plans for Blender and the incredible rate of work that’s going on every single day. There’s no years of radio silence it’s all open, honest, warts and all communication. You can see where Blender is heading and you can watch features added and bugs get fixed in real-time.
There are two applications today that give me the same excitement as I had back in the early days of LightWave, Houdini and Blender. That feeling that the devs have got your back and aren’t just doing the work as a job they’re passionate about what they’re doing and that genuine feeling of excitement for the new release, those feelings have long since evaporated over at Newtek.
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Seriously Erik, both wind river and the Green Book had a few shots(some snow done in Wind River-very good movie by the way and important topic about missing and murdered indigenous women) done with LW and it was by the same artist who still uses Lw. And Walking Dead hasn’t had any LW in it since season 1 which was a decade ago.
not sure where you get your facts from steve, but stargate studios were using Lightwave until around 2017, its only the last couple of seasons things started to switch, they have lightwave showreals and news articles about welcoming and featuring lightwave 2015, they also have a freelance database where many users still use lightwave for shots, even on new shows like treadstone.
I hope more of the LW community stray over here to this thread and while they’re here I urge them to take a look at https://developer.blender.org/ and look at the plans for Blender and the incredible rate of work that’s going on every single day.
I know you’re not suggesting that LW users have had their head under a rock for the 20+ years that Blender and Houdini have existed. However, there have been many oddly placed software invitations tossed at LW users on the NT forums. I can count on my hand the very small number of crayon-chewing, clueless LW users that are unaware of Blender or Houdini …and could actually make use of this “new” information.
I contribute to Blender development but I do most of my work in LW. It is good to see Blender finally being useful and management that can grow it. It is also interesting to see some innovative, disruptive and exploitative business coming from it. That will keep artists on their toes.
not sure where you get your facts from steve, but stargate studios were using Lightwave until around 2017
Not to further dash Steve’s propaganda of doom, some employees there still claim to be using LW.
I don’t understand the silly scorecard element of this discussion. We use whatever tool that gets the job done. I have absolutely no need to know if the tools I use are winning a popularity contest.
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funny as wwhen I googled it the 2018 showreal reply thread also talks of lightwave, then it occurred to me, the LA studio is literally around the corner from newtek, so wouldn’t it make sense to use a product that you can go and have face to face support with, probably why FOX and Discovery still use it as well.