Are those metaballs in the first 10 seconds?
Here is a little addon wich cycles through the selection when activated,
you can assign it to a key to your liking
switchselection.zip (813 Bytes)
- its a training script, not even a hack or a something else. Still very weak in the blender python department, so be awre of it
- not so sure about it, getting used to the 123 keys / multiselection, and it felt more like a setback when I used it for testing. but might be worth to try out
others missing:
multishift is missing⌠I go one but its crawling slow and breaks some interface paradigm (esc for confirm), might post it in the script section one day so more experienced programmers can take a look
Thanks for that, Tischbein3!
Yeah, I like it for the speed. Or so I believe. Want to try it as I have machin3 installed and it takes the 3 key.
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I started 3D with Lightwave so its really sad to see how things have played out. But I think itâs just time to let it go.
I canât really see anything saving it, Even if It suddenly got a huge amount of development I donât think it would survive, Itâs just too late.
And open sourcing it wont save it. Look how long it took Blender to get to the stage itâs at with the amount of respect it now has in the industry. I think the only way Lightwave will keep going would be for the new owners to intergate it into there exisiting tech as a way of doing live motion graphics, Virtual sets etc.
Yes, and I bet that OpenToonz, just like Blender, is flourishing as Open Source whereas neither did before they became so. So even with issues of certain bits of code needing to be replaced, I still think LightWave would have a better future under the open source business model.
I do agree, itâs a very, very sad state of affairs!
Looks like it, although personally Iâm unsure whether that older version even had MetaBalls. I come on board with LightWave 9.6, but the version used in the video is quite a bit older than that. It was some years after that video that I finally got mine. At the time I first started drooling over Lightwave, I was an Imagine user on the Amiga, and man, that really brings back memories as well!
Exactly, but the point is it survived because it became open source. To be honest Iâm just glad to hear it hasnât died, and from the sounds of it it never will be allowed to die otherwise others would have no interest in purchasing it.
I still believe the best way forward for LightWave is for the company to open source it, rebrand themselves as âLightWave Foundationâ, and follow the same business model as the Blender Foundation are doing with Blender. I cannot see any proprietory business model ever being a success, especially since any such 3D suite needs to compete with Blender which is free!
Success isnât even close to being on the cards unless they ditch the proprietory business model, but as long as sheâs safe from death (and I think she is), Iâm happy!
The big problem I see with lightwave being opensource is Blender.
Blender is the king of the hill when it comes to opensource 3D apps. I cant see anything competing with that.
And from what I have read and been told Lightwave will pretty much need a complete re write to become a unified application that has the poteitnal to advance enough to compete with the big 3D apps.
So you might as well start your own opensource 3D app, call it Lightbender 
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Or BlenderLiteâŚlol
Certain bits of code?
I think this speaks to a basic issue here. And it is in fact the Elephant in the Room in any conversation that centers around some positive spin on LightWave. No matter what that is.
And that is simply confronting the magnitude of the problem that LightWave faces.
You wonât find anyone who has a first love with LightWave any stronger than me. Yeah there is a whole group of us. You are included. I am just saying you wonât find anyone more of an initial fan boy than me. I am just trying to drive that home. I absolutely wanted LightWave to succeed and I was going to the matt for NewTek a few years ago when everyone else was doom and gloom. I tossed my dice and upgraded to LW 2015.
But through all of that for years I had been telling everyone that this was not going to turn around right away. That it was going to take a decade or more to fix all the way.
Maybe you have me to blame for being so vocal. Maybe NewTek listened. Maybe they could finally see that the reality was that they started too late and they were going to have to look 10+ years down the road to finish the job. And that is not being outrageous. At all. It took them 16 years to bring Modo back up to where LightWave was as far as end to end features circa 2000.
I just wanted everyone to confront the reality of what it would take. I wanted NewTek come out and admit it and make a plan. A good solid long term plan.
And what they did was went completely silent and dark.
I am going to guess they did not do that because of a certain bits of code.
It is a massive undertaking. And it was not just lack of interest or negligence. It was just complete incompetence and who knows what all for 20 years. NewTek never has and never will own up to what they failed to do. It is like it is easier to not have to take the walk of shame back to the dugout after looking at strike three.
And the end result of that is a mystery. And for some people never getting any closure. And others simply never having been told how incredibly difficult the job would have been and the massive investment it was costing with no return. And therefore a continued kind of lack of understanding as to how bad LightWave really was. I imagine they will take this to the grave.
And so you just have to connect the dots yourself and move on.
Legality and availability aside, LightWave is not a candidate to be revived through open source. That would be the final nail if anything. And so the best bet is to simply let VzTek milk it for another year or so with maybe an upgrade. It will have more life there, than with Open Source.
The only slight bit of hope is that they sell it to a company for the name. And said company with billions to burn on a 3D app from scratch can start it over.
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I can see many people complaining about having to use 2 programs just as much as they complained about right-click-select.
How much potential liability is there in a decades old private code base? Could there be code in there stolen from another company by a employee who went from that company over to lightwave? Could there be evidence that a new employee under a teporary no-competition agreement started writing code for LW months before they were legally allowed to? I vaguely remember a story about some code that contained endless mentions of some guyâs ex-wife from whenever heâd be trying to code while simultaneously getting yelled at.
Thereâs a lot of thorough review and clean-up that should be done before releasing old private code to the public. I suspect this kind of stuff would prevent the entire version-control commit log/history from being included in the release of some projects.
Indeed, OpenToonz attracted the attention of a few very talented coders. Even a teacher who taught himself to coding to support OpenToonz to teach 2d animation in schools.
And one or two developers who worked on Blender to migrate OpenToonz to Linux.
It has become arguably a very nice competitor to established commercial 2d animation software, even if the first version was rather⌠awkward 
But open-sourcing an application is certainly no guarantee to continued development.
Thanks for the insight, Richard, all this stuff is a real eye-opener for me. To be honest I hadnât a clue about any of it. Well, I did sense at the time that people were not happy about Layout and Modeler running independently, and indeed, that was the major design reservation I had about LightWave myself. I still regret selling it though.
Never knew how serious it all was, I never picked up on that. I could tell some people were frustrated, but thatâs the same with every program out there so I never saw it as serious as it has turned out to be. It kinda reminds me of the demise of Commodore, massively loved but let down by poor decision making etc.
Herbert, exactly, and this demostrates why it doesnât matter what people tell me, Iâll always be of the opinion that itâs better-off open-sourced than not, and better open-sourced than dead. Even with the serious problems it has, and even if it never regained massive ground due to these problems, I think it should still be put out there for the LightWave die-hards and enthusiasts. Even programs that are open source and completely idle are never dead, they are always available for someone to take an interest in, but they are never dead.
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I think that this hits on the core of the problem from the beginning,(2000ish) regarding NewTek management and LightWave. And that this mindset requires, humility, transparency and honesty regarding LightWave, its development and its future. And last of all if not most importantly a full understanding, belief in and support of the LightWave community. And this last little bit, the major oversight. In fact you could say the main reason for LightWaveâs downfall in the end.
They completely underestimated the community. And they alienated and showed disrespect for the community and thought of the community as mainly a toxic band of immature users who always had a slant on the negative with carping criticism. Not that some users did not deserve that labelâŚlol
But, what I mean is that overall they did not respect the idea that the community would support LitghtWave. That is the very last mistake they made, which is interesting.
Right at the end Rob Powers was doing the right thing with the LightWave blog. He was creating that community spirit and showing respect, openness, honestly and transparency. He laid out a plan, was open about it and was sharing progress.
These are all of the basic traits that would be necessary for LightWave to survive as open source. And how did NewTek management respond to this? They shut it all down, went silent and have not spoken to us about any of it in nearly 4 years.
I have a side theory about this relating to the sale to Vzrt. And that is simply that LightWave development was in the red in a big way. And when you sell a company they open up the books. And if they find a place that is bleeding money, that will devalue the company.
So they shut it all down, clamped off the bleeding artery, prepped what was left of LightWave with a minimum development and delivery personnel and released LightWave 2018, recorded the revenue stream to the accountants and then made the final deal on the sale to Vzrt.
That is my theory of what was going on behind the scenes in the last 3-4 years.
Purely speculation and âduck reasoningâ.
But regardless, they have shunned the community, and they did not appear open to the idea that we would help them keep LightWave alive.
What incentive do they have to change that now?
I think there are a variety of advantages for them to actually offer it as open source. Or at least sell it or the name. The question is, do they have the insight to see that?
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Up till this day there are a number of quite outspoken individuals who blame Rob for the demise of LightWave - while we all know it was Newtekâs overall mismanagement that is the reason.
I guess it is always easier to pin the blame on the person most visible.
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Yep. Aware of that. He took a lot of heat for ending core, even though he never did, technically. He ended the core program. A distinction. I have theories about the reason for that from a legal stand point, based on how they sold it and what they were offering and what they were actually able (or unable to deliver). All speculation again.
The community was divided though based on that initial CORE sales pitch. Most of the people blaming Rob also bought the sales pitch hook line and sinker.
Rob was the reason. Could not have been that NewTek actually sold them swamp land in Florida. It was the guy that adroitly informed them that the land deeds they bought were worthless, not the con artists who had sold it to them in the first place. I think it is called âkill the messengerâ. He definitely suffered from that.
And CORE is one of he reasons there is still this completely unrealistic and out of touch concept of what it takes to build software.
But CORE was nothing more than snake oil. âGet it here folks! 15 years of development right here in this little 2 year bottle. Thatâs right. Step up and get your membership, theyâre going fastâ
To anyone who still believes that CORE was the answer and still blames Rob for âending itâ I have some swamp land to sell you in Florida for a 100 US dollars an acre.
Only cash and money orders please.
To those people who still believe in gravity and other laws of nature, LightWave needed a development sprint of about 10-15 years.
No matter how you do it. It needed that. And that was not what CORE members were sold. And so, refunds were given and free upgrades.
Then back to the reality that they still had to sell LightWave and continue with a 10-15 year plan to rebuild it. They gave Rob a 3 year leash and then pulled the plug.
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Yup, exactly how I see it.
It was interesting to read Robâs final message when he left: âask for a roadmapâ.
Well, there was none.
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I still say that Lightwave lasted as long as it did because Tim Jennison loved Lightwave.
Tim retires and development slows, then Newtek is sold to Vizrt, and Lightwave is left on the vine to rot.
Lightwave will always be my favorite 3D app, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now.
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And still isnât and never will be.
Rob was most candid in his Facebook message. If you are on the side of the fence where Rob messed up and was fired, you donât believe what he said. And you believe VzTek is still silently working away at the next version. And there is still âsomething in the worksâ.
But if you live in a world where things still fall when you drop them, then what Rob said was absolutely candid and true.
NewTek has no plans for LightWave future. And I am going to go out on a limb and imagine that the guy working directly with management would know.
I you ever visit the newtek forums you can see that the tricaster topics start to be more common than Lightwave threads. You can also see former lw devs answer questions in the tricaster threads but nothing in the lw threads. I think this is evidence enough that lightwave is dead. Still some fanatic lw fans believe that next version is on the way and will change everything⌠sad.
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Maybe spelling it out helps
A open source version wich allows the usage of closed sourced commercial plugins is a gap they could fill (so the license has to be non gplâŚwich on the other end is a problem for coding). Also they got a support structure wich invites for software as a service as an income.
And they can stil develop and release their own version as closed source, once they sorted things out.
Currently their IP dates and becomes more and more obsolete. wich is a bummer
I am not even going to pretend to understand even half of what any of that actually means legally. But considering so much of what is good about LightWave are the plugins and other products, it does complicate the issue considerably.
I am talking about this completely aside from the practicality of actually doing it. Or rather before either a sale of it, or open source of it could even happen.
Also aside from the practicality of it even succeeding at all. The myth of successful open source is that it is community based. It isnât. It takes a few or one person that can shepard the project. The community gets involved and contributes behind some kind of leadership.
Blender is an example of a number of factors that had to be in place to succeed at all. The basics were that Blender was already embraced by a growing community, a community on the way up. New, young people looking to the future of Blender. And second Blender had strong leadership and a core team of people. And finally after the initial fund drive it found a way to get financed and expanded the core team and the leadership remained in tact.
LightWave on the other hand has a dying community - literally. Most of us who even remember that it once had a future are already retired, or should beâŚ;(
Blender had a leadership who, while they did perhaps make mistakes as far as the initial company plan, did have a vision for the future of Blender, and faith and belief in a young and growing community.
Blender has had younger and younger people come to use it. LightWave users just keep getting older, no young people even know about it at all unless they visit a thread like this.
Blender was built on newer technology and the organization was agile enough to move on the need to update the technology and the code and succeeded. And continue to act on updating and optimizations.
LightWave on the other hand is built on technology that had to be replaced 20 years ago. The organization failed to even understand this until it was too late. There was no leadership of any kind really after 2000. And the company was not agile enough and transparent enough or driven enough to do anything about it in 20 years.
And the culture of this company is not one that would, just up and say, hey, we messed up. We gave it all we can. Here is the code, âLong Live LightWave!â They have not even shown any real interest in selling it.
So even if all of the legal ducks where in a row, and NewTek wakes up one day after being zapped by a light from an alien ship and does a complete 180 from the last 20 years and actually does something right for a change, to either sell it or give the code to a bunch of old retired farts, who is going to lead the charge?
What realistic future will LightWave have in this case?