Lightwave 2015 revealed!

[robpowers3d]

Wow! Wonderful update. The FBX exporter update is great! Just tried it with Unity and no more multiple materials to deal with. The bullet additions, the camera matching, the importance sampling, Genoma 2 and all the cool little workflow stuff and features. It's going to be hard to go to my family's Thanksgiving dinner, I just want to play with LW2015. Great Job LW3DG and Happy Thanksgiving! WOOT! YAY YAY!

Fantastic! We are very pleased to hear that. Yes a lot of work went into FBX and Alembic just to name a couple interchange related improvements in 2015. They are both much improved.

[lwanmtr]

Again...gotta say kudos to the whole LW team...bullet bones is something i wanted a while...the other stuff is cool too.

[jasonwestmas]

As I understand it the HardCORE pricing has always been $395 for Charter

Yes, that's what I recall. We get a $100 discount on this upgrade, thanks for that.

[robpowers3d]

So the special price I'm locked into is the same price everyone else is paying?
Wow I feel so 'special' right now.

If you are in Post Charter it is currently the same upgrade price with the pricing offered at this launch but with your HardCore post charter price guarantee you have no concerns about the price changing at any point for the period of your 5 upgrades. In fact we just came out of a period where the price for upgrades was $695 which HardCORE members were not affected by at all.

Having locked pricing is a benefit in my opinion but it is up to you to determine if you find it to be something that you wish to continue. As far as I am aware the HardCORE pricing guarantee did not insure that your post charter pricing level would always be less than the regular pricing although for the charter members it is because they receive such a large discount.

I've also softened the policy by offering a 30 day grace period for those that have not yet upgraded to the 11.x cycle at the time of the 2015 release as the policy states that those HardCORE memberships would expire upon release of the next paid upgrade.

[robpowers3d]

That's all well and good Rob, but makes no sense unless your plans are to raise future upgrade costs substantially. In your scenario someone wanting to stay in the Hardcore program and who wants to get LW2015 now would have to shell out either $790 or $990 respectively. I suppose if someone wants to upgrade to 11 and then to 2015 in the future that would work - but why do that? And don't you really want everyone on the latest version?

Of course we do and all HardCORE members have had an extremely long window of time to upgrade to the 11.x cycle.

[jeric_synergy]

To be honest I did all that, and then just said "screw it" and upgraded. One thing I did notice was that my Space Navigator crashed the Demo/trial, but works fine in the full version. Odd.

Please FogBug that one: it'd be really nice if the DEMONSTRATION model worked more than perfectly.

[wesleycorgi]

Need to update content (refers to a mysterious Lightwave 11.7)

[prometheus]

Not sure I am right or wrong here? it seems to me that there is a pattern of a lot of work going in to moving things, with all the stuff going with genoma for rigging, raycast in the 11 cycle, spline tools in layout, now bullet springs,hinges...dynamic parenting etc.


Michael

[adk]

Kudos and well done Rob and the whole extended LW3D group! I don't know all of you but you're doing a fantastic job in, let's face it, a bloody tough environment, and I don't just mean outside competition. Ultimately LW is a product as well as a business and the fact that we're still here is a testament to everyone's commitment to solid future for LW. Cheers and happy trails.

[mav3rick]

Nice one folks.

Won't be upgrading this month though, the car just dropped a valve yesterday, complete engine rebuild required... :-(

bad luck bro ... bad luck ... hopefully santa (mechanic) will save a cent or two for you !

[Wayne Heim]

Rob, any chance you guys have fixed the issue with the vertex normal maps that has been around for many upgrade cycles??? This is a real issue for those of us working with cad data. If you rotate any object with vertex normal maps in modeler the vertex normal maps get screwed up? At times it is way easier to have the freedom to rotate things in modeler while you work on them. It's a major headache that have been around way too long.

Please tell us there is good news!

Wayne

[rustythe1]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggg ggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
sorry had to shout, great news on an update Rob, however not so great for me as I cant download right now! have been a hardcore member from day 1 and all upgrades in between, my account is showing me as a charter member, but when I click on the upgrade it is listing it as a $495 upgrade so I will have to wait until I here back from CS. check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox.......check inbox

[jeric_synergy]

Thanks. They don't really look any different at all. So what does "Improved Slider Drawing" mean?

Possible the >>routines<< that draw them are more efficient, not especially the specific pixels that are placed on the screen.

[VirtualFM]

Hello guys!

I'm happy there is a new Lightwave out. I'm not thrilled that you adopted the "year nomenclature", I was actually feeling proud that you had not yet succumbed to that "year nomenclature" plague, just like Cinema 4D, Houdini, Modo, Fusion, Nuke, etc, but ok, you probably made your marketing research and came to the conclusion that would be a better approach.

I would like to know what would be the price for this in Euros. I can't find it on the page, and the Newtek-Europe site has nothing on Lightwave (at least I can't find it).

The reason I am asking is because I want to confirm that the price I have on my "upgrade page" is the correct one. I had a situation with the upgrade last time (weeks spent talking with costumer support) and want to be sure the price I have on display is the correct price for someone who is entitled to the "Charter discount", i.e., $395 instead of $495. Last time I had an hard time to convince you that I was entitled to the discount and want to be sure that situation is clarified for good. (basically, I bought Lightwave Core on the last day of the discount, 30th March, but due to evident delays in email exchange and Newtek-Europe/Newtek-US communication the registration only took place on April 15th and because of that your sort algorythm(?) was putting me on the $495 batch with no discount).

Thank you.

[Snosrap]

Snosrap,

Your assumption is not correct and we've never publicly announced any product called 11.7 so I'm not sure what you are basing your statement on.

Hence the smiley. And from first glance it looks like an 11.7 upgrade.

There are very specific and valuable new features and enhancements in the LightWave 2015 release which have existed in no other product version other than LightWave 2015.

I don't doubt that considering we are talking about Lightwave.

While it is true that we did indeed provide amazing value to our customers throughout the 11.x cycle we are ultimately running a business and it is unrealistic to expect to get free product releases indefinitely.

Agreed and thank you for that amazing value with the 11 cycle.

The fact is that we have invested significant development resources into this version of the software and I value the hard work that our LightWave development team put in. I think many of our customers will as well.

I don't doubt that, but 3 plus years to go to 11 to 2015 seems way too long. If that's caused by the rewriting of the architecture then that would be understandable, but we the users are not seeing much fruit of those labors. (I'm talking Modeler BTW, I love the progress with Layout.)

LightWave 2015 is indeed a product developed beyond the 11.x development cycle and is not part of that cycle. I hope you will give it a full look before making a statement like this because I think you will find that LightWave 2015 includes significant additions including some really great workflow enhancements that will likely make you very happy.

I love LW 11 and no doubt will love 2015 and will be upgrading 4 seats tomorrow. I just hope the 2015 naming convention won't mean lame yearly paid upgrades. After all it took 3 plus years to go from 11 to 2015.

LW is really good but more than good - it's fast - and that's why we continue to use. I consider Modo to be superior in it's technology, but it takes less time to get the job done in LW and that's what matters to us. --- (Modo license is collecting dust with the exception of occasional use for for getting SubD models into Inventor/Solidworks which is amazing. )

Thanks to you and your team for your efforts, lets just see better polygonal handling in Modeler for 2016 - or sooner.