Yeah I did a rug with the Blender fur and it just picked up the material that was on the rug. Very nice and a lot less setup than with LW - except for the fact that you actually have to use Blender.
I've really become comfortable with LW's shading system and Blenders just doesn't seem to stack up right now, so taking advantage of Blenders great rendering may not happen for me. I quit using Modo because of the Shader Tree - everything else in Modo is superior to LW fundamentally - but I went back to the kludge.
As for Lightwaves shading system, I do not grasp here exactly why it is more comfortable, is it quality or feature wise, (as such I do not see much of difference other than perhaps an upperhand for blender for certain materials)
But as for working with a surfacing panel and texturing, yup..I prefer working with that kind of UI than how it is structured in blender, it´s harder to get an overview, harder to copy and paste materials, and by default not as nice preset system as Lightwave has.
If you care to ellaborate a bit more on why blenders materials doesn´t stack up..I would listen to that and take notes.
And as marander also said I, didn´t, and don´t like modos shader tree either.
To me I find myself being irritated by the scrolling of the materials in blender, and ways to select and multicopy or multi edit surfaces, also VPR in lightwave to choose the materials by just clicking, it´s not there in blender.
further notes, you acces nodal material editor a bit easier in lightwave I think, cause it opens it as soon as you enter node edit, while in blender you have to setup or have a default workspace with shader editor active for an object, maybe that´s not a big deal and
such, but it reduces the workspace since it needs to have both shader editor active in one window, and viewport cycles for instance, these windows are dependend on their respective scale and isn´t floating, while in lightwave it´s a matter of keeping the vpr fully in one viewport, unchanged no matter how the floating window is managed by a move, or minimizing it, or tab hide and make visible, I actually prefer it that way than constantly dragginb blender windows.
Within any nodal editor though, I find it´s much more pleasent to work with in blender, rerouting which you cant in lightwave, muting nodes which you cant in lightwave, zooming to a much better zoom level..which is just too poorly in Lightwave.
Plus For Lightwave nodes ..is that it has much more node stuff to work with, as well as fractals, and also..I really like the left list where the various sections of nodes are, and search filtering etc..it is better than blenders I think.
Don´t forget to activate material vx library in blender addon preferences, so you can add your own preset materials, it´s not as slick as Lightwave´s though, then there are some other addons as well, but can be slow to use, I have to check out more about what´s there though.
I must correct myself about windows in blender, you can of course for some properties panel, right click and choose area and then duplicate area to new window, that will create a new FLOATING window from let´s say the outliner..then or the right side properties panel you can change that to be a shader editor, or focus on material in that window, it´s quirky though.
In the top part of properties you can then check that pin icon to have the material section only in focus.
That´s the closest to Lightwaves popup surface window I think.
