What is Lightwave missing in order to get back on track(TV series, commercials, etc)?

[inakito]

I remember many moons ago when Lightwave was probably one of the most used softwares for commercials and TV series, and wondering how isn't used that much any longer in a time of having much more series produced and with much more vfx than before...isn't Lightwave deserving to take back its place again? What is missing in order to make this happen? What happen to the teams that were doing amazing commercials and vfx for TV using Lightwave? What happen to the producers believing in Lightwave?

[wingzeta]

Other software companies invested time and money in their product, to modernize tools, and to market, and create tutorial content, to showcase the software. Lightwave is a great software, though the "destructive" workflow among other things should have been updated years back to keep up with the competition. Despite the technical concerns, the lack of marketing may be the biggest failure. You have a software that is one of the fastest to learn, with the best licensing and price (outside free), and you couldn't get a bigger slice of the market? Could it be, because most people don't even know you exist? The free option has only become viable for pro work in recent years, so it is not really an excuse. The actual competition was Maya, Max, and C4D. They all went through some major updates, and had a strategy to corner part of the market. LW had the aborted core, and then had some nice updates, but never could catch up. As for strategy, does a number of "add a seat" discount promos count as a marketing strategy?

I'm hoping Vizt sell LW to someone who has a love for it.

[VonBon]

LightWave is missing what it always has, Real Funding.

What I think LightWave needs, is a company willing to
make the success of Lightwave apart of the main goal
instead of a optional side quest.

[Shabazzy]

I think in addition to Wingzeta's points, the domestic (and by this I mean North American mainly, but also Canadian and Western Europe to some degree) VFX and animation studios have had a really tough time competing with Asian services providers over the last decade or so when it comes to acquiring commissions. Their focus has been (in addition to other things) on trying to get an edge by having the latest and greatest toolset to provide higher quality finishes and quicker turnaround times as part of their USP.

(as a side note, I received an email regarding a webinar being held by PNY Pro on the topic of "NVIDIA Studio Tools Roundup – GPU Acceleration and AI Enhanced Visual Applications". In it, they will apparently be discussing, among other things, and I quote:

How 3D Animation performance that models and renders rich virtual worlds with blazing fast performance makes a world of difference across leading creative apps including Autodesk ARNOLD, Blender and Adobe Dimension.

BLENDER for God's sake! It's now viewed as a leading creative app by NVIDIA!

I was so depressed on reading that. We now resume our regularly scheduled musings.)

Unfortunately, LightWave has been left behind in this area and although it's still a highly capable tool and can stand toe to toe with the best of them in some areas, it's just not a "sexy" tool. And now that it's glory days are long gone, the number of users learning and using it are a mere shadow of what it used to be. So even if by some sort of miracle the VFX and animation studios all decided that LightWave was their tool of choice, there probably wouldn't be enough trained users to take on the work.

I believe that, given the fact that direct-to-consumer productions are the future for many production studios (Disney is "restructuring" to reposition itself in readiness of this) and (for the moment anyway) the web is an open platform with no gatekeepers preventing you for getting your work seen. My view is that LightWave is the perfect solution for the independent 3D artist/animator to create their own content to be seen and sold to fans of their work.

I think we're living in a time where creatives no longer really need to bend the knee to the studio gatekeepers and undervalue themselves for work. They can take their own projects directly to the paying public online and bypass the middleman by taking advantage of the miriad of online services that can help them take on the Establishment. And LightWave is perfectly placed to help them do that.

Now, if only we could somehow get the word out.

[VonBon]

I know a lot of folk might wanna Sparta me off a cliff for saying this, but.

I like the fact LW is separated Modeler/Layout. Communication between the two
could be better, but it does work. So what if communication between the two worked
the way we wanted?

I'd sale LW in a module based platform and offer both perpetual and subscription models.

[TreyX]

most high-end studios have extensive maya pipelines in place, so it's hard for LW to re-emerge as the central app for dcc as it was when it was literally THE major player in the broadcast arena until the early 2000's. LW was still a popular choice in the early maya days, too, because of it's affordability and core loyal user base, and because many existing shows relying on LW still had production schedules booked. but with maya's python extendability and virtually unlimited capacity to support custom code for proprietary studio apps, maya overtook LW as the industry standard in broadcast, and cemented its lead in pretty much every area of high-end visual FX. i truly think it was customization extendability that catapulted maya as the industry standard. indie shops like mine, and hundreds of thousands of others worldwide, still rely on and truly LOVE our LW-centric pipelines; i don't see that changing in the foreseeable future. as long as we can do killer work with our LW pipelines, we will continue to keep them and maximize our investments. but as for LW making new headway in the large studio industry, i don't think that's possible at this point. major shops do everything from film to games to broadcast VFX and commercials, so their established pipelines can handle every challenge and adapt accordingly. is the nature of the beast.

[VonBon]

AMD did it.

[OFF]

I think it is mainly down to the lack of interest of the company in its offspring. Starting from the 6th version, it was obvious that the company chose the path of least resistance instead of developing LW in step with the times. Then, all the same, the moment came to revise the strategy in favor of the full development of the LW, when LW Core was announced, but ... we all remember how it ended. and everything returned to its former tracks - sluggish patching of holes and attempts, stretched for 10 years, to gradually update the program code.
And it looks like if the development of the drug continues without the enthusiasm of the company itself, without its love for this product, it will finally lose its relevance soon.
Those. it's all about desire, and how to develop LW is already a secondary issue.

In my opinion, if we try to consider the steps to keep the drug on the market, given the company's modest interest in its development, we can identify several key steps or targeted strikes. Why is there no LW in the pipeline of large studios today? One of the reasons is poor integration with other packages. But for several years now, the USD format has been adopted, which allows you to transfer complex animation while maintaining the hierarchy and modifiers of control and movement from one animation program to another. This is a much more advanced level than the FBx suggested. The introduction of this format into the LW code, in my opinion, would help LW return to big cinema, to the pipeline of game studios, etc.
I do not know whether it is easy to do this or not, but if there is no need to rewrite the entire LW code for this, this step alone could significantly advance the LW on the market. The second step is to increase the overall performance of the Lw, especially the Modeler. Even if you do not change anything else, but increase the performance of the Modeler at times - this alone could make life much easier for many users. The requirements for the models are constantly growing, the models are becoming heavier and the Modeler, who was suffocating already 10-15 years ago, is now quite barely alive against the background of modern challenges.

[Tim Parsons]

Other software companies invested time and money in their product, to modernize tools, and to market, and create tutorial content, to showcase the software. Lightwave is a great software, though the "destructive" workflow among other things should have been updated years back to keep up with the competition. Despite the technical concerns, the lack of marketing may be the biggest failure. You have a software that is one of the fastest to learn, with the best licensing and price (outside free), and you couldn't get a bigger slice of the market? Could it be, because most people don't even know you exist? The free option has only become viable for pro work in recent years, so it is not really an excuse. The actual competition was Maya, Max, and C4D. They all went through some major updates, and had a strategy to corner part of the market. LW had the aborted core, and then had some nice updates, but never could catch up. As for strategy, does a number of "add a seat" discount promos count as a marketing strategy?

I'm hoping Vizt sell LW to someone who has a love for it.

Modo is the successor to LW. Does anyone remember the "Two Mommies" statement from Brad Peebler. So it was in the cards to update LW to a more modern architecture. Too bad NT didn't want to play along.

[TreyX]

Modo is the successor to LW. Does anyone remember the "Two Mommies" statement from Brad Peebler. So it was in the cards to update LW to a more modern architecture. Too bad NT didn't want to play along.

modo is not the successor to LW. modo is primarily a modelling app -- i don't know any studios that have a modo-primary pipeline for feature or broadcast animation. LW's animation, dynamics and rendering features are far more intricate and robust. just because some of the original LW developers left newtek to start up modo doesn't make it LW's successor.

[Rayek]

indie shops like mine, and hundreds of thousands of others worldwide, still rely on and truly LOVE our LW-centric pipelines;

Surely you meant hundreds OR thousands of other [indie shops]? I doubt there were hundreds of thousands of Lightwave seats even in its heyday - or even general DCC seats in the world.

[Sensei]

I remember many moons ago when Lightwave was probably one of the most used softwares for commercials and TV series, and wondering how isn't used that much any longer in a time of having much more series produced and with much more vfx than before...isn't Lightwave deserving to take back its place again? What is missing in order to make this happen? What happen to the teams that were doing amazing commercials and vfx for TV using Lightwave? What happen to the producers believing in Lightwave?

Art schools, universities need to teach their students 3D applications. When they finish school, they will buy it and demand it from future employers.

So, company making 3D application must think primarily how to persuade art schools and universities to use their app..

[roboman]

When it was on top. I had a couple Atari 8 bit systems, some high rez S-100 systems, an IBM with cga and monocrome and an Amiga 500. I had kind of a home made a toaster sort of thing, that consisted of 8&16mm film cameras in a box with a monitror, taking one frame at a time. I got offered an Amiga with a Toaster, S-VHS Camera, couple S-VHS recording decks and the software. It was less then a year old, but still cost me more then my car. So the choices, writing custom software for the S-100, film camera in a box with a monitor, toaster/lightwave or something that cost a lot more then my house. The choice of the toaster and lightwave was easy. Then Amiga died and you could get 'standard' video out cards for the pc. 3DS became the easy choice. then Lightwave came out for the PC. I used both until windows, then the interface for 3ds changed to much.

Since then there have been lots of choices. what is Lightwave missing? Look at the other options and what they have. A huge thing. For a decade I would bring up lightwave and people would say they thought it died with Amiga. For a decade after that I would get a 'what, never heard of it'

[ianr]

MoGraph....simple MOGRAPH.-Commercials

TAFA recoded in 64bit & intergrated (or like Messiah was Huge Pluggie)

Muscle & Facial system (Bones I/K)-Commercials & TV Series

With a updated supa-instancer just ask Byrphi (Both)

Crowds GeN intergrated into Flocking & instancing- TV Series


Marketing: Earlier support for Slates (Film) Showcasing

[kyuzo]

I don't have any experience in working in a large studio, so can't comment on pipeline features which may or may not be there, but two things I'd say would help tremendously is promotion of the work which has been done with Lightwave (pointing at Mr Rid...)
and making it an attractive option for students to learn.

Lightwave has always been aimed at the small studio, indie creators, and one-man bands. I'd say this is still it's strength. Studios with small, agile teams.

I was teaching a class of 10 year olds at my local school a short block of lessons on 3D before 2020 went sideways. The first thing I showed them was the video of the FX work done on the Mk1 Iron Man suit in LW. It may be a few years old, but they all recognised it instantly. Then I told them that they were using the same software. Had their full attention.