LightWave 3D Group Offers $695 LightWave 11.6 Crossgrade to 2D and 3D Artists

[cyphyr]

https://www.lightwave3d.com/crossgrade_promo/

Not sure if Terragen is included in the possible 3d/3d apps you can cross grade from but I would have thought it was.  I'm checking now.

CONFIRMED, great bit of software, I've asked how long the offer will hold for, I'll let you all know.

[mhall]

Just clarifying ... Confirmed as in TG qualifies?

If so ... that's a heck of a deal: $800 off. Less than half price.

~Micheal

[cyphyr]

Just clarifying ... Confirmed as in TG qualifies?

If so ... that's a heck of a deal: $800 off. Less than half price.

~Micheal

Yes Confirmed

[TheBadger]

I keep thinking about this. Don't imagine Modo would ever be cheaper then this deal. How long does this sale last??

Anyway, I really have had a hard time making up my mind. The only thing Im sure of is that I can't afford a full version of Houdini, and won't be buying Maya regardless.

I feel like a big cut in price makes LW easy to pick over Modo. Money is definitely a factor for sure. Not wanting to spend too much on something I'm not certain about is the only reason I have not maid up my mind already.

Does this version of LW you linked have absolutely everything a non sale version would have, without exception? And do you or anyone reading this feel like LW will continue to be developed for a long time?

[cyphyr]

Lightwave has been in development since the days of the Babylon 5 TV show. I see no reason why the company (Newtek) should stop development. It is used in a lot of major TV shows and films and has a large user following.  There's plenty of info/bragging on their web site about awards and shows they have been involved with.

As far as I know there is only one version of Lightwave. You get two programs, Layout (for rendering, animating and running simulations (hard body, soft body/cloth, wind, smoke and fire etc) and Modeler, which dose just that, modeling.  This split of the program into two halves some people find annoying and some find just right. 

You also get a 999 render node license with the one purchase so you can install your own render farm.  Sale lasts to end of September. Contact them on the link above and they will send you a unique code to get your discount.

[Oshyan]

Lightwave *did* go through some major development turmoil several years ago (the "CORE" debacle), let's not forget that. LW's future seems to be looking better now, but it's important to recognize that it did go through a very rocky patch.

I'll also weigh in as one of those people who absolutely despises the split between "layout" and "modeling". I feel confident that it is a holdover from days of less powerful machines and if LW came out as a brand-new product today with no existing userbase, that approach would be highly questioned, but it is appreciated by some of its loyal users largely (IMO) because they are used to it, not because it's particularly beneficial. Every other general purpose 3D app does without this arbitrary distinction and it works just fine, if not better.

LW is certainly used professionally, perhaps more than Modo, but not more than any other major app (3DS Max, Maya, even Softimage or Houdini). I'd be curious to know the pro-work split on Modo vs. LW...

Anyway, I'm not against LW, it's got some cool features. But definitely give it a thorough evaluation before plunking down $700 on reputation alone.

- Oshyan

[TheBadger]

$695 for an end to end I have not read any complaint threads on LW yet though. Those threads are really what tell you about the soft.
I would hate to pay even 50 dollars and get the bullshit I get with Maya. But Maya is free to learn on

[yossam]

You could always get an educational licence..............It's how I started with it a long time ago. They used to be very reasonable, but my last update was 9.6 (Core scared me off) so I don't know about recent prices. 

[PabloMack]

I've been using Lightwave as my main animation package since 2004 (a whole decade hurray!). Dan Ablan of 3D Garage has some really nice training videos for both Lightwave and Modo to help you get up to speed. In his Lightwave [8] book he wrote that, if you used this software every day for 40 hours a week in a full-time job it would take you 8 years to learn it. Listen to his wisdom. Your time is also very valuable and you don't want to wait too long when you can be spending those years getting up to speed instead of waiting and hoping. One thing that sets the LW user interface apart from other 3D software packages is that their buttons have words on them (not the stupid icons that other programs like Maya have, sorry I hate most pictured icons). The Modo interface is much like Ligthwave's because the three programmers who founded Luxology left Newtek to do so. They carried much of the LW knowledge and philosophy with them so the programs have a lot in common.

LW actually started way back with the Amiga and migrated over to Windows and the Mac when that platform went away. Its been around longer than many professional animators. Personally, I think that a split between modeling and scene animation makes a lot of sense. It is just where they put the split in some ways is undesirable. I think the thing animators will dislike most about having two programs is that you can't see your model fully rendered until you load it into Layout and this is because the modeler program only has a preview renderer in it. It may not be as bad as it sounds as you can still edit the textures in either program. But when you edit the textures in Layout then you have to remember to explicitly save the models because the default save command only saves your scene. The texturing system has a node system much like Terragen's but it is locked into the texturing panel. A thing I love about LW is that the user interface is always fast and responsive as compared with Terragen which can be horribly sluggish. The relatively new VPR render mode is really nice as it does a final render in real time and it does this much faster and more completely than Terragen. It is nice to interactively work on the textures and lighting without having your interface freeze up. What I don't like about LW is that your animations are not just stored in the scene files. Much of the model animations are actually stored in the model files. So when you do animations on models you can't share these files between scenes as you will destroy previous work you did on another project. You need to make copies of the model files if you animate them. The procedural texturing system is very powerful and I find that I often don't need high polygon count models in order to get finely detailed surfaces on my models. This very well might apply to other packages, I don't know.

But I must also say that LW's modeling features in the Modeler program are very basic but there are a lot available. There is a very rich set of operations to do very detailed work on individual polygons, points etc. But a few things have been broken since long before I started using the software so you have to learn which ones work and which ones don't. The Boolean operations are very nice and useful but they are not perfect. Sometimes it gets confused and I have to finish the operation by hand. These are things like fusing two objects into one and cutting a hole in one with another etc.

Because Modo has some very nice modeling features that LW lacks, I have both programs. I upgraded to Modo 801 but I haven't used it for anything but modeling because its user interface, to me, it more difficult to understand. It may just be because I learned on LW.

Things that I find that really make a split between the engineering mind-set and the artistic mind-set are in how the coordinate systems and navigation are done in different software packages. To use Lightwave the way it was intended to be used is that you vicariously place yourself in the skin of the animal or person you are modeling. This means that, when you load the model, you are looking at its back. This aggravates a lot of artists because they want to model their objects backwards so that they face the artist when you, the artist, is looking in the +Z direction. But if you make this mistake then the labels on the user interface won't make sense to you. Always face your models in the +Z direction and then the labels will all make sense. Let's face it. It is trivial to turn the model around to look him in the face with your navigation tools so that is not a big deal. Also, when you turn the model around to look at it imagine that you are inside a sphere and you are pushing against the far side of the inside of that sphere to turn it around. Pushing right turns the model more to its right while pushing left turns the model to face it more to its left. In Modo the navigating is done like your model is a sphere and you are pushing on the near side of the outside of the sphere. Pushing left makes the model look more to its right and pushing right makes the model look more to its left. This is backwards to me because to animate the model properly you must put yourself in the place of your model. The two programs navigate opposite to each other and this takes some getting used to. However, the coordinate systems are the same between Modo, LW and Terragen.

[Kadri]

Personally, I think that a split between modeling and scene animation makes a lot of sense.
It is just where they put the split in some ways is undesirable. ...
But when you edit the textures in Layout then you have to remember to
explicitly save the models because the default save command only saves your scene. ...
A thing I love about LW is that the user interface is always fast and
responsive as compared with Terragen which can be horribly sluggish.

I don't like the the split. The very basic reason for that was probably only that
Allen Hastings wrote the Layout and Stuart Ferguson the Modeler.
It doesn't make any reason today because when you are animating you are modeling too-sometimes.
It is a debate that is going on for 20 years and i am still waiting for a change.
Saving only the scene and only objects is one of the side effects of that split i think.
It isn't a problem for me very much but every other program is working quite good in one package today...anyway.

Just curious why-when do you feel the Terragen interface is sluggish sometimes Pablo?

[TheBadger]

Well, the money matters. But previous to this thread I had made up my mind to go with Modo as soon as I had the extra cash. But saving a few hundred dollars is something.
Still, my feelings are I should go with Modo. Modo just "feels" right to me. I mean in terms of how the UI is set up. And how it feels to sit in front of the screen. Which may sound trivial. But I got to tell you, after having been frustrated to the point of quitting I think its ok to want to feel comfortable with the soft you are going to pay for IMO.

Having said that, I know MODO is not as developed as LW and for animation no where near as used as Maya. But I think it will be.

All I know is that I should not try to make money with Maya since its a student version, and I don't want to buy it after spending the time with it that I have. And I really don't care that its the standard. Does not bother me at all that it will be harder to work not mastering maya. Would rather not work.

Pablo,
Your post  of how lots of the tools in LW are broken just completely turned me off on it. That is a endless problem with maya, things just don't work right, and you dont find out until you have done a crap ton of work, which you end up having to redo... Often.
Also it crashes if you look at it wrong. Which is why despite that Autodesk was generous enough to let me have a free copy to learn on, well anyway thats why I bad mouth it so much.

If you bought a car and every time you turned on the AC the engine died, wouldn't you want to punch the guy who sold it to you in the mouth? Well I got a free car that I later learned I had to dump cash into... Its a hassle. And maybe a bad analogy too, but thats all that came to mind right now

Terragen is way more stable then maya on my mac. But I guess that maya is a much bigger program? Still TG does crash on me sometimes. And like Kadri I would like to hear about what is sluggish in TG in your view. I have some complaints as well, but my mac is getting a little long in the tooth (2009- which is like 87 in tech years), so Im not always sure whats what.

[Kadri]

...
Pablo,
Your post  of how lots of the tools in LW are broken just completely turned me off on it.
...

I think you might have that read it in the wrong way Michael.
It looked that he was just comparing it to Modo to me...

[PabloMack]

I don't like the the split. The very basic reason for that was probably only that Allen Hastings wrote the Layout and Stuart Ferguson the Modeler.

For sure. I guess the thing I like about at least having two different modes-a modeling mode and an animating mode separate is that the local coordinate system for the model and the global coordinate system for the scene really are different things. When you rotate the model in the scene you are rotating the model's local coordinate system along with it. Personally I use LW's motion editor extensively and I would have difficulty understanding what I am doing if I could not see the local coordinate system in my mind while doing the animation. Having both visible at the same time would make the preview far too busy with having many objects in the scene at the same time. I understand that most artists don't use the motion editor much and just like to turn and slide those handles and stay oblivious to the models' local coordinate system. Having only the model's local coordinate system visible when modeling is a great help but I like it that I can turn that off when it gets in the way. But all of that is likely to change with MoCap which I am still waiting for. I doubt Modo will have anything to offer in that area for a long time.

Just curious why-when do you feel the Terragen interface is sluggish sometimes Pablo?

When I click on a field and don't get the cursor for like 10 seconds then it goes away and the main thread only visits the user interface periodically. Typing a new value into a field and it starts rebuilding the preview on every key stroke when I haven't finished typing in the whole value is torture to me. The program shouldn't even look at the new value until I am finished typing the whole thing in. It only takes a new character about once every eight or ten seconds sometimes. This happens all the time to me when I have large populations which is almost everything I do with TG. It is a hassle to have to go through that sluggish interface struggling to disable those populations so that I can get something done. Then I dread turning the populations back on again because I know the user interface will slow down to a crawl. I have scenes with, on the order of 30 and 50 Million instances of trees. Even if I turn off preview render it doesn't stop crunching crunching crunching in the background. I have to disable populations if I am going to get normal user interface response. Tell me how I can edit a population when it is disabled. There is a population threshold beyond which the edit handles won't even come on at all. When I load a scene with large populations enabled I know that I won't get any user interface response for what seems like two or three minutes. When I have lots of large populations it seems like a grueling process to turn them all off and then hunt for the ones I need and turn them all back on again. Is there a single button somewhere to disable all populations and re-enable them again?

When I am going to use my render farm I turn a system on and load the scene. Then I turn the next system on and load the scene. Then the next and the next. By the time I have brought them all up, the first system has the preview done and it is ready to start taking key strokes (about one every two to four seconds maybe). I go looking for the render node and I drag it knowing that the pan won't actually happen for a few seconds. If to this process I had to go enabling a bunch of populations to every system in the render farm it would really be time consuming so I just keep them enabled from the saved file. The one thing I have to do different on each system before starting the rendering sequence is to select a different frame range for each one.

Of course I have never put 30 million instances of anything in LW so I don't know how it would behave if I did.

There is one aspect of navigating in Modo that I wish you could do in LW. In Modo you can spin your model around along every axis and it goes round and round. You can even give it a push and it will continue spinning on its own until you grab and stop it. That is a really cool feature. In LW's Modeler you can spin your model around completely only horizontally. If you want to pitch up or down it asymptotes to looking up or looking down and it can't go any further when in Modeler. If you try harder and harder to spin your model up or down it gets so close to the asymptote that it takes forever to get back to where you have some control. A few times I have knocked my mouse accidentally and the view gets locked (but not the user interface) looking up or down and it is easier just have to exit and reload the program.

Pablo, Your post  of how lots of the tools in LW are broken

I didn't write "lots". I wrote "a few". Badge, I think you have already made up your mind and you don't want to be talked out of it. The only problem with that choice is that you have been one of the most active users in the discussion of MoCap, which in my mind means you want to get into it. I don't think Modo will go there for quite a while because it doesn't even support character animation very well. On the plus side, though, you don't have to only have Modo. I have both Modo and LW and you certainly can start with Modo. It would be nice to know a TG guy that you can learn Modo from. I have only scratched the surface. Modo's painting and UV mapping tools are excellent. You can even paint on weight maps which I haven't done yet. One flaw in Modo's painting tool is that those parts of the model that aren't in the preview frame aren't going to catch any paint. They should fix that.

I have to question Oshyan's assertion that Houdini is used by more professionals than LW. Sure, LW has lots of amateur users but I have no doubt that LW users outnumber Houdini users by the droves.

Sorry for belly-aching about the TG user interface. I love what TG does. It's just the implementation of the UI could be better.

[Kadri]

... Is there a single button somewhere to disable all populations and re-enable them again?
...

Not sure if you know or not this but you can use the "D" key to disable and to enable any node Pablo.

And better you can left click with your mouse in the node network view and select many nodes at ones and then use that D key too.

Or you can have all your nodes in one group -as they mostly are by default like
objects,water etc.- and click on the bar of the group in the node network view and use the D key.

[PabloMack]

Thanks, Kadri. This kind of information can be very useful.