Poor old Inspire

[Simon]

Well if it wasn't for Inspire - the first 3d software I'd used - I would never have got into Lightwave. So as a tribute (and also so it's not condemned for years to come to have 'never' against it on the home page) here's my very first render from all those years ago ... and before anyone says "hey that's a photograph you've scanned in" it really is cg ...

[cagey5]

I'd agree, without Inspire I wouldn't be here either. I hope they do something with that product line to keep pulling in the keen hobbyist.

You soon end up yearning for the full package as I did, and when a nicely timed special offer comes along, out comes the credit card and one more member has been coaxed aboard.

[oxyg3n]

I also began on inspire, I think it was during my first year of community college in the fall of 2000. That is when I was certain that I wanted to go into cg and make video games and do computer animation.

I also found my first render. It isnt much and sure is humbling to look at.

[Tom Winnicki]

Yes, poor old Inspire. I'm here thanks to Inspire as well. But Inspire renders really don't have to be humbling to look at. Most of you probably already seen this one.

http://www3.sympatico.ca/tom.winnicki/my_site_images/Remote_controller_02.jpg

I just have a serious question for NT. Did you lie about the Inspire update?

"... out comes the credit card..." LOL! That's what I did :)

[mattclary]

Ditto! I also got my start with Inspire, and the bits had barely settled on my platter before I was ordering LightWave! LightWave is the single most incredible app I've ever used.

[Scolopendra]

I'm sorry for asking but what is Inspire 3D? I've began with LightWave yet on Commodore AMIGA and never heard about Inspire 3D. Is it NewTek's software also? Is it some kind of LightWave Light?

[dwburman]

Yup, Inspire was LW5.6 supposedly aimed at web/multimedia/print crowd. It didn't have the fancier animation controls and you couldn't render animations at a higher than video resolution (640X480 or something like that).

The most annoying thing about it was that there were no numeric controls. You could circumvent that limitation by buying a plugin pack made for it or find some free LW plugins (most LW plug-ins worked) that replaced LW tool (like "super set value" or whatever)

Also, it had fewer layers in modeler and was missing some tools.

I think it cost around $500 when LW cost $2500, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

I switched to LW when they had the LW+AURA +free upgrade to L[6] for $2000. I suddenly had a bunch of money to spend and I knew right where to spend it :)

Dana

[mattclary]

The lack of numeric input is what drove me to LightWave.

[Scolopendra]

Hmm, thanks for the explanations. Nevr seen it. But since I have LW it is not big problem as I understood ;)

[Panticle]

I myself started on Inspire and eventually upgraded to 7.0. Believe it or not for most my modeling needs I still use Inspire over LW. I think it is a powerful tool and after tinkering around with 3DS Max I can say it is also one of the user friendliest modeling products around. I can't see how anybody would willingly use Max over LW. Max is amazingly unintuitive and easy to forget which icon does what.