I used it for about a year. Loved it as well. Loved it a lot. I switched over to Maya because Maya just seemed to be more dialed in and played well with everything else I was interested in using at the time.
Interesting question⌠You may be in a unique position to observe it all again. Just pay attention to Modo.
Modo?
Sounds like a strange bird. Is that actually a software? 
For small studios XSI was a lot simpler to use and set up in a company, but freelancers were a lot harder to find.
ChickenâŚeggâŚ
But Maya really quickly rose to the status it has now, and nobody could do much about it. And with that came even more integration into 3rd party solutions. Chicken.& egg again.
And weâre still using it decades later 
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Was a bit of a shock to see the title of this thread, but glad to hear itâs not dead.
Personally I couldnât care less what happens to anything under Adobe or Autodesk, in fact Iâd probably hold a party if they ever went bust (well, one can dream I suppose), but coming from an Amiga background I have always had a soft spot for Lightwave and always wish it well.
I think the problem for Lightwave is that itâs distributed on the rapidly failing paid model. If they were ever to open source it and shout about it, make it really known across the industry, I think they would eventually claw-back a massive userbase. Blender is able to steam ahead using an open source model and therefore, being of the same variety of software, I see no reason why New-Tek couldnât be as successful if they followed the same end user-friendly business model as Blender, for Lightwave.
Guilty as charged. XSI could not survive my need for a tool that was getting more traction. As soon as I switched to Maya, instantly my woobly fbx to MotionBuilder and back pipeline was fixed. And many other things just fell in line. Even the cloth and hair workflows where superior.
I would categorize your perspective of that as unrealistic and somewhat delusional. LightWave wonât make a comeback under NewTek as they are no more; as well, they made it clear (Dr. Cross) that LW wasnât worth the continued effort. I believe the phrase uttered was, paraphrased, âLearn Blender. It has things LW will never have!â ca 200-2005.
I wish I had taken it to heart a bit earlier.
Blender is steaming ahead because of the community behind it and the focus of those stewarding Blender into the future. If you know LWâs history, you know the stewards are no longer aroundâŚ
I admit annoyance at reading your post. If you own it, use it for all it can provide you.
I am ok with it now being killed. Never want to see it come back âlike it wasâ because thatâs not viable. I have used this singular interface, with morphable windows, simulations, etc. with great pleasure. I find that projects come together MUCH FASTER in this one-program mode. When I go into LW now, it feels SO DATED. And for what it cost, I canât say it is faster than Blender.
Dpont is a saving grace. Investing in understanding his nodes translates to all other apps. Other than thatâŚmeh.
Robert
I just spotted this thread, and while I havenât had time to read through it yet, I just wanted to make my own feelings clear regards LightWave. Iâve just visited lightwave3d.com, which I believe is owned by NewTek, and both NewTek and LightWave appear to be alive!
Hard to be sure what youâre suggesting. It kinda sounds as if youâre suggesting that NewTek themselves have declared LightWave dead. Well if thatâs the case, whatâs the point in wasting decades of code anyway? If they consider it dead already then surely they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by chancing an open source model for LightWave!
I canât really pass comment other than if LightWave really is dead, then the brains behind NewTek must be equally dead if they cannot see the potential in chancing something that is dead anyway. A persons brain would have to be of the single-cell variety to not realise this, so if thatâs the case, itâs not surprising the product has died anyway (thatâs assuming it even has).
BTW, not to point out the obvious, but open sourcing the thing would bring an end to the sort of problems the person who made the video about it, was complaining about. If it became open source, you wouldnât need to depend on NewTek to give you the things you feel LightWave is desperately lacking, stuff he feels NewTek has ignored!
Whilst the product is not dead, per se, fair to say, itâs been a looong time since it was given anything but lipservice first from Newtek and now Vizrt. LW will still work, heck, I still have 9.6 on my system, but serious development, heh, think folks are still hoping âthis next releaseâ will address modeller failings. Which I gave up on when CORE was dropped. 
What makes you think people would want to use it even if it where free?
It would have to compete with Blender (so nothing changes basically except the fee of entry).
Even among pirates who get every tool for free no matter what it is, nobody really cares about Lightwave, many donât even know it exists.
The only people left in the world that care about it are those who have used it for years, and that community is really small.
Compare that to Softimage XSI, if that would go open source (being really delusional here as it would never happen) it would immediately have a growing community.
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I think Blender might have grabbed the attention of 100% of all new aspiring 3d artists and the only other things such people would consider using are the industry dominant programs and/or anything with a very clear superiority over Blender in some way. I donât think open source Lightwave can attract them.
Now, a fork of Blender focused on adding whatever tools/features/UI pleasures that made Lightwave good, that might attract a small community willing to donate more $-per-person than the regular Blender community. Iâve never used LW so I have no idea what was excellent about it.
I read this and I think, where have you been for the last 10 years?
On the humerus and humble side, you remind me of me in 2005 when I came back to use LightWave since I was using it very strongly in 1995. And I was really none the wiser. It was a couple of months in when I realized the original developers had long since jumped ship into a life raft with Modo painted on the side. And that was 5 years before!
So to cut to the chase for you, and summarize, it went like this:
(and as a note, I am not going to go back and forth with you on this or get into an argument of the veracity of these statements. Youâll just have to take it as a brief summary for the sake of a high level understanding modified by my opinion)
In 2000 ish the original developers left to create Modo which you know. Then NewTek was left with the task to develop LightWave, a tool they did not really understand. And the biggest and most obvious and egregious oversight was why the original developers left.
The original code and the technology that LightWave was build on was already too difficult to fix. The better plan⌠start over.
Had they understood that, it is likely the developers would have stayed and started writing from scratch. But they left and LightWave was in the hands of incompetence.
Its simple. In 2001 it needed to be replaced. It wasnât. They had a chance to rewrite it from scratch twice in the last 20 years and failed.
Unless LightWave gets rewritten or replaced, it fails. And it is not even wroth entering into a debate over why. Over time it just falls into oblivion. That is the fate of LightWave starting in 2000. And here we are.
Nothing is being done to revive it. NewTek is not actively engaging with the community because there is nothing to be actively engaging about. They have admitted defeat to themselves but to no one else.
LightWave is on life support and no one has the courage or humility to pull the plug.
As a platform and technology it is dead. It has lost its value to the world of 3D and no one in their right mind would touch it. Not even the owners.
The most value is the name LightWave as a trademark. That is it.
This is not to make it personal or piss anyone off who still uses it or sees its value. That is not the point. In the grand scheme of technology and the future, LightWave as an app (in its current form) has no place. It is really that simple.
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Iâm grateful for the replies I just got cause I had no idea about some of that stuff.
I came on board with the same LightWave 9.6 as colkai has hung on to. I sold my licence in the end, I had a few reservations about its design and could not afford to upgrade so moved to Blender. But at the same time, LightWave had something I found way better than everything else out there, and that was the use of text on buttons instead of icons. Might sound trivial, but I cannot even put into words how damn much I absolutely love that about LightWave. I love being able to âreadâ a button rather than have to figure-out or remember an icon representing what it does.
The interface always felt crisp and professional in ways the other stuff out there did not (and still does not). It also felt âspecialâ, hard to explain it and Iâm not sure whether coming from an Amiga background helped, but LightWave is definitely special regardless of any shortcomings I have now been told it has.
LightWave is LightWave, and while I totally understand peopleâs sentiment after reading some of this stuff, are you honestly telling me that you think an iconic 3D suite like LightWave would be better off dead than being made open source and therefore granted eternal life?
Really?
I mean come on, man, surely open-sourcing LightWave would, at the very least give it a cult following where die-hard LightWave fanatics will do whatever needs doing as long as it can be done. Blender herself was brought from the dead and, as far as Iâm aware, has been completely rewritten in major areas as well. Thatâs the power of open source and community contribution!
You talk as if LightWave is some shabby old amateur 3D suite, when actually sheâs a production-ready powerhouse just waiting for open source to bring her back from the brink of death. So while I understand the sentiment, I personally do not agree she should should be left to die. No way man, and if she does die as opposed to becoming open source, then I for one can honestly say I will never again witness anything so incredibly dumb and pointless in my entire life!
There is absolutely nothing to be gained from trashing what must be millions of coding-hours worth of work that went into the iconic 3D suite that is LightWave, and it would surely come across as sadistic if that were ever to happen. LightWave was born on the Amiga (another product that understandably has a cult following now), and just like the Amiga, LightWave should be set free, so that at the very least, sheâs allowed to live the cult life the Amiga now enjoys!
So hereâs to LightWave and hopefully a fun and crazy future ahead for her 
As far as I know, there have been few software companies that are willing to open source the old technology they no longer have a real use for. Even Blender is FOSS only because the community managed to raise enough money to purchase the code from NaNâs investors.
The most notable company I know of which converted their old tech. to FOSS is Id Software (which eventually opened the source of all of their engines up to the one that powered Rage), but open sourcing the old stuff and letting the community turn it into something great is very rare outside of the game industry. Perhaps Lightwaveâs current and former users can pool their money together to buy the source, but chances are VizRT wonât give an offer.
I am just so glad that I am one of those that killed LightWave. I wish I could kill it over and over and over again⌠Since switching to Blender about two years ago, I have come to hate that mother-effing piece of shit, so very, very much my friends. Every single time I have to open the f___ing thing to render old jobs with minor client tweaks, I want to puke my goddamn guts out. It is a horrific nightmare working in its archaic, ass-backwards and retarded world. Inept, lightyears behind, pathetic garbage. Good effing riddance. I yearn for the time when I absolutely know for certain I will never need to open that unholy cluster-f*ck again. BTW, I used said piece of shit for almost 20 years. Professionally, sadly.
Leaving this on a good note: My life has been improved drastically, since switching to Blender. I get so much more done in so much less time, Blender is actually fun to work with, and working with up-to-date (sometimes state of the art) tools never leaves me wanting.
These are my last words on the matter. Peace yo!
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They (VizRT) isnât selling, as I understand it so thatâs not happening.
The only thing I want from LW are a few keyboard shortcuts:
- spacebar for modeling selection of point, edges, faces;
- floating panels (3.0 has this);
- Others I canât think of at the moment.
After that, Long live the Amiga, Long live Lightwave! Itâs nice to grow older, buying toys for play, realizing that what was doesnât have to still be.
LW will stay right where it is. The trademark has the most value. And thatâs only for another 6 months. The tech is passe. For all practical purposes, blender is that program that is open-sourced and 3D ready.
They milked that cow and she ainât got no more milk.
Norka,
You have expressed many a feeling. Thanks for that for me.
Yup. 20+. Told my wife to divorce me if I suggest buying anything for LW. I like her so it really wasnât a setup. Chuckling at my thoughtsâŚ
Unplugged 10 dongles, put them in a cabinet and happily blending away. Your post had a lot of real feelings in it.
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That could be very true, but Iâve never understood why companies, if theyâre struggling and cannot gain ground and risk the product dying anyway, donât see the benefit in making the product open source. Itâs true that making your product open source removes you âofficiallyâ as the owner, but the reality is that for as long as you play the game in the spitrit of open source, youâre always going to keep the majority of control over it.
Blender is open source, and I cannot imagine a fork of Blender ever gaining ground over Blender itself unless the Blender Foundation messed-up in some way that upset the open source community. Itâs very likely that the company that ownâs LightWave donât understand this dynamic, and I think most companies donât.
If LightWave were open-sourced, the company would still remain in a position of having the most influence over its development regardless of the fact that it technically would be no longer owned by them, which is exactly the same dynamic as we have with Blender and the Blender Foundation etc.
People trust Ton and the Blender team, and for as long as that remains the case, Blender will flourish without the need to be forked. LightWave would be no different, and people would go along with the guidance of the company that open-sourced it, providing they believe in their goals. And the good thing of course is that being open source even makes those goals all the more realistic and achievable.
I just found a video on YouTube, this is the exact video NewTek sent me on a VHS tape when I enquired about LightWave all those years back. I used to play that tape back time and time again, drooling like crazy because at the time, I really had no chance of actually being able to buy it, I was just mesmerised by it, absolutely besotted.
So for any of the younger people out there who donât understand why LightWave is so special, consider that LightWave was first of all born on the Amiga, and it was used in a whole bunch of cartoons, TV ads, TV series, movies etc. To get an idea of how serious a tool LightWave is, consider this video was produced almost 25 years ago, and check-out the positions of the people speaking in the video.
Sheâs a beauty alright!
Just watched the whole thing with headphones on, absolutely brilliant, really brought back memories and this video was quite a few years before I could even afford it. By the time I finally got to purchase LightWave 9.6, there was none of that stutter you see on those old computers, she was as smooth as an Italian waiterâs chat-up line 
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Even Ton Roosendaal had to buy back the rights to Blender from the investors back in 2002! This was actually the first-ever crowdfunding event.
Another good example is the open sourcing of OpenToonz - it took the effort of a number of people to make that happen, and they had the support of Studio Ghibli and a paid developer to make it so.
Newtek/Vizrt will probably never let go of the LightWave IP or its source code. The source code includes proprietary licensed third-party code / libraries it relies on, and these will have to be removed. Open sourcing a previously commercial application code base costs time, effort, man-power, and money.
Also, at least two parties have attempted to purchase LightWave from Newtek in the past year or so (according to rumours) and it is said both failed to do so. I believe the guy behind Liberty3D tried his hardest to get this done, but it did not pan out.
I do agree it would be interesting to see LightWave continue as an open source product, and I am sure it will find developers to work on it in their free time, but it seems the deal-breakers to blame are Newtek / Vizrt. The current owners donât seem to be interested to let it go, for whatever reason.
The developers and LW team were let go, left themselves, or were moved to other project teams internally, so no-one is currently even working on LightWave.
It is in Limbo. And as @Richard_Culver mentioned no-one at Newtek seems to be willing to pull the plug or take responsibility. No-one is communicating. And that is the saddest thing and most cowardly behaviour in my book. And very unfair to the current LW users who, in spite of all the evidence, remain hopeful that there is a future for LightWave.
Worse, they are still selling LightWave on their site, as if nothing happened and it is business as usual.
Just a very, very sad situation.
(I have used LightWave for years and years in the past)