Lightwave Open GL

[unc1e meat]

First of all, I'd like to make it clear that this is not intended as an offense towards Newtek. Just making an observation.

Today I was messing around with Osirix which is a medical imaging software ( http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/Index2.html ). Well, I was working with a 3d object that had over 1,400,000 points. Not sure about polygon count exactly but it was very high as well. In that medical 3D software on my G5 with an ATI X800, it rotated very smoothly even with major parts of it with transparency. When I exported the object to Lightwave, things slowed down to a crawl in the viewport...and that's without any transparency! I kept trying to rotate the object and after about 5 seconds or more, it finally moved a tick. This was as fast as Lightwave could rotate it.

I'm sure there is more going on behind the scenes with the Lightwave software than Osirix since Lightwave lets you do tons of editing to the mesh but still, I just couldn't believe that it was so slooowww compared to the medical 3d software open gl viewport.

Anybody else notice this type of thing with other software when compared to Lightwave open gl?

[mkiii]

Newtek are well aware of this. LW doesn't currently make much (if any) use of the latest fast video hardware, which is why they are making improvements to OpenGl in LW v8.5 & v9.0.

Just take a look at some of the Siggraph videos & do a search on the forum. I'm sure you will then see that this is being dealt with.

Roll on 8.5

[unc1e meat]

Sounds good to me if they are working on this for future versions.

I was kinda concerned at Siggraph this year for Lightwave. Although Newtek had a really nice booth, I noticed that Lightwave is talked about less and less every year at Siggraph. For instance, the past 5 years, the bookstore there always has a large variety of Lightwave books to choose from. This year, they said they didn't even bother getting any. I saw 8.5 and 9.0 featured at Siggraph this year and really liked what I saw...although I wasn't able to test out the Lightwave open gl on a mac. I really like Lightwave a lot and am just hoping that the next versions of it will bring it out of it's current slump. I know Newtek is trying hard to do this and I really hope they succeed.