I see some Blender influences in there. I’m sure that Maya, Max has influenced it also, but I think that Blenders rapid development forced Newtek to act. I like Lightwave, I just think that the only thing it really has over Blender, currently, is it’s render engine. I think when 2.5/2.6 is fully ready and Sintel is released, Blender will get a lot of new users. I also think in the next 18 months we’ll see Blender being used more in tv and movies.
I don’t know, it looks like CORE is using the GPU + CPU and fully multi-threaded. Blender seems to have a chip on it’s shoulder about using the GPU for anything other than viewport redraw. I have seen threads asking why Blender does not use the GPU, several times. And here we are with a brand new re-write and no GPU support. Also, parts of Blender, like occlusion processing are still single threaded which is a heavy hit on scenes with lots of geometry (aka movie scenes).
atom, true on your points. I didn’t say CORE was a direct copy but influences are there. If you read the forums over there, they had more and more users singing the praises of Blender. They saw that Blender was advancing quickly and they new it had an unbeatable price. That’s how Lightwave came to power in TV, the low cost and it’s capabilities. Newtek didn’t want to go the way of Truespace or be where Electric Image is today. I think when CORE does come out, Blender will also be influenced and make adjustments.