Any recent info/rumors on LW 2021/22 ?
- Thread starter sami
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SA3D
Addicted User
Rayek
Well-known member
But no LightWave plugin available right now, correct? It is a case of "might happen".
Gungho3D
A.K.A "The Silver Fox"
Rayek: yours would be the all-time most enthusiastic, cheerful and super informative response I've ever had on this forum! ...Never been a better time to make the switch to Blender, in particular with the upcoming v3 release around the corner. You will like many things, and vice versa you will have to get used to a different way of thinking compared to LW as well. It's best to do a small but exhaustive project in B to find your bearings.
The new roadmap was just posted: https://code.blender.org/2021/10/blender-3-x-roadmap/
Good times. You will be shocked by the openness of communication between the Blender Foundation, its developers, and the users compared to Newtek. I met and talked shop with Ton and the developers at various occasions this past decade, and they're super friendly and engaging.
Check out the Blender Cloud, and perhaps consider signing up to sponsor Blender's development. I did along time ago, and the information and files on there are very helpful and interesting. Where else can you get direct insight at the production side of things and access the production files (but being in a production yourself ;-) )?
The LW2B Facebook group may be helpful:
Lightwave to Blender Support Group | Facebook
A support group for Lightwave users who want to move to Blender!www.facebook.com
Also, look into Houdini as a companion app. Blender and Houdini make a good combo, and the indie version of Houdini is very affordable. Word of warning: Houdini takes some getting used to. But where Blender stops, Houdini starts, and vice versa. They complement each other nicely, in my opinion.
If you already render your work in a different render engine (such as Octane, or so) chances are you can continue using that render engine in Blender. Definitely look into Eevee for some realtime rendering goodness, and into alternatives like Renderman, ProRender, and LuxCoreRender. Or even Redshift, which is now also available for Blender. Or Vray. Sky is the limit, lots of choices.
Avoid pouring too much time or money initially into purchasing all sorts of add-ons: most add-ons merely package existing functionality in a wrapper of increased usability. That said, a few commercial plugins do make life so much better (Hardops and BoxCutter for hard surface modeling, for example). Don't forget to check out the free collection of built-in addons. Many are great, if not essential. A few free plugins make life much easier for users coming from other DCCs: Kekit, TexTools, UVPackMaster, Miratools, WMesh, - all free.
That should get you started. Enjoy the ride!
... But I must confess I was being mostly tongue-in-cheek, hence the italics for the word "upgrade" to Blender
.I have looked at Blender, use it regularly as a conduit for checking and tweaking FBX models exported from LW for use in Unreal Engine. Blender has been in receipt of a lot of TLC regards development (and amazing add-ons) for quite a while, and their user base is super enthusiastic and many of those guys are such capable artists.
For the immediate future, while I may take the route of up-skilling in Blender over time, the truth is I just get to move so much more work so much faster using LW 11.6.3 + Octane 4.x (no subscription).
prometheus
REBORN
Good to see they may work on this..they said it was focus on that, one of my big complaints that it lacks procedurals ..and also the lack of compability in areas where lightwave is more open to procedurals, vector velocity for particles and much more.
Ivé asked if Denis could port the rman collection to blender, after all that collection itself is a conversion from rman to lightwave procedurals, if not him doing it, perhaps some other in the B community could pick it up.
I´m a bit dissapointed they seem to do not much about the current mantaflow fluids though, I think it´s bad.
I would also need to purchase lensflare addons, and wonder how those lensflares compare to Lightwave built in lensflares.
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prometheus
REBORN
if it´s a bug..yes.
When you move or rotate a mesh, you can´t hit the playline and expect the fluid to emitt properly, you have to go the the cache settings and reselect cache type and then play again, extremely frustrating, the ol blender 2.78 don´t have that issues.
And the same with forces, it doesn´t react to them properly either when you change them, and having to go in and select replay in cache is just too tedious.
Apart from that it simulates way too slow and they need gpu simulating capabilities.
I´m still only messing around with the 2.78 fluids because of these issues.
I just downloaded the latest 3.1 alpha and will check how it performs again.
The ol system have some quality issues that can arise from time to time though, which mantaflow maybe doesn´t have.
And with Lightwave native gas solver, it´s so slow to simulate and very hard to acheive any decent openGL preview with the tick display, and also..lacking true wind forces.
and TurbulenceFD, may be the better alternative between all these options, but still..no direct pbr rendering unless export to VDB, and it lacks both fire and smoke openGL at the same time and multiscatter within it´s own renderer is horribly slow, it almost demands octane..and tfd is developing soo slow for the lw platform, and I wouldn´t be surprised it will end soon as well, especially if octane isn´t supporting lw either.
So nothing is really satisfying me ...enough, maybe I should just go the full Houdini Route for the fluid VFX, I need to update the apprentice version first, but first I need to
check the latest blender release, meanwhile..the lw team is of course working hard on the next Lw release as should be expected ..right.
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shame with Mantaflow, there is a $60 addon for B that should work nicely.
but i guess once again B fails at delivering nice built in fluids.
TFD won't have a dedicated v2 LightWave release i think, i think it is a Standalone only,
Houdini should be the way. But slow renders there i think ?
prometheus
REBORN
shame with Mantaflow, there is a $60 addon for B that should work nicely.
but i guess once again B fails at delivering nice built in fluids.
TFD won't have a dedicated v2 LightWave release i think, i think it is a Standalone only,
Houdini should be the way. But slow renders there i think ?
I´m not that versed yet with the render settings in Houdini, and using 18.0.287 isn´t what I should use to judge it upon, I need to update.
However, within that version I only got mantra,mantra pbr, renderman,renderman ris..and Ivé only been usin mantra and mantra pbr for rendering smoke etc.
I don´t t think it´s necessarely that slow to iterate refine in preview, depends on all the settings in the mantra rendererer for stuff like volume step rate, volume qualite and much much more, you need to know these ones well to optimize the render.
The problem however..that is the initialization of those Houdini Mantra renders takes too darn long, in lightwave and blender it kicks in immediately, while houdini seem to have some initialization process that takes too many seconds before the actual iteration render starts, once it starts to refine though..it´s not that bad, but depends on how you set those render settings.
But as mentioned, I need to try other renders that comes with more recent houdini apprentice versions.
For blender, had they put some extra power on the fluid engine simulation speed and leverage the GPU power as TFD does and have it update properly, it would have been a professional contender I would think, as it is now I would hesitate to call it a professional contender, but perhaps with some serious learning, and patience togehter with some plugins it could work in a professional environment, then again..who am I to judge..not having worked professionally with fluids, all I can judge from is my own findings and how smoothly the workflow works for my hobby stuff and quality of it..which isn´t up to the level I want so far.
And TFD isn´t any option ..though It could have been the best bet, partly I lost interest in trying to test it out, had many questions that Jascha never replied on, so a part of loosing interest was the lack of feedback from him at that time.
And now it is also a question of not buying in to a third party fluid plugin for a 3D software that probably will not get any further updates, which also affects how third party devs are treating their dedicated plugin for that main software.
Blender overall, generally is what I would like to focus on..since the day´s of expecting more from Lightwave is decreasing, it´s just the fluid tools that isn´t up there yet, so that leaves me perhaps only with Houdini as of interest foremost.
Cinema4D, not likely
3D max, not likely..even though I have commited to a basic 3d max course in 1999
Maya, not likely either..but perhaps rated before cinema4D and Max.
Blender I have reached further in the learning curve than the other, apart from Lightwave that is, so that is prio, then comes houdini which I think the learning curve has come further than max or maya.
Embergen, I was interested a bit in, but somehow lost interest..maybe later.
Lightwave´s volumetric quality is mainly controlled within the pbr volumetrics itself, along with all the other settings such as scattering, emission, the step rate is there, while in houdini you have to jump between the mantra render settings where the quality is set, and then back to the material properties for the smoke/explosion etc and set fire gradients scattering etc, so in that sense I think Lightwave is a bit easier and more direct to adress those things.
I´m not that fond of Houdinis very long occupying sliders for every value, where I feel lightwave has a better way with just the slide icon buttons and a displayed value accordingly what is set.
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The Dommo
Globally Illuminated
Well, development of Octane renderer for Lightwave has been announced as stopped, since the userbase is shrinking and because Lightwave is abondonware (the words of the developer) so they cannot keep trying to get Octane features to work in an ever-aging architecture with zero support or development.
prometheus
REBORN
Yep..that I think would be the best..they unfortunally by inaction and by no trustworthy communication...probably have damaged their own reputations as a trustworthy company by now ..for this product anyway.
If they still have the intention to continue development, they should just drop that ghost that haunts them with that fear of communicating wrong, or the fear of disclosing development secrets and instead with no further delay, immediately write something in the blog about what their intentions are, it´s just fear that is the killer...Unless of course, it is by intent they do not want to develop and just extract whatever code they can in to their own other products where it is possible, customers are expendable.
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my guess is that Windows 11 and Hardware will run it for many years still.
guesstimate > minimum 5 years
guesstimate > maximum 15 years
i'm still running 11.6 on a PC, however new AMD cpus couldn't handle Win 7.
so had to jump to Win10. (even tho' Win10 socks a bit compared)
the bad thing is that LightWave 2020's biggest drawback is the render speed, and it is hard to fix that without a developer.
it is possible to add for example Cycles into LightWave, however without support from NT, it would be quite fragile.
...so while you can prolong current usage, making improvements will get more and more difficult without VizRT support.
prometheus
REBORN
Uhhm, can´t be as relaxed as the birds, nor keep torturing myself by what could be or not, Vizrt has their mission, and my mission is to research
other render engines right now, and especially for fluids, smoke and clouds etc.
May post some samples perhaps privately on that from Houdini And blender how it handles the fireshading, with multiple scattering in both programs, and faster and more accurate than VDB samples in Lightwave and it´s lack of multiple scattering, and a proper scatter channel ..which seem to not work as it should.
Previews, I would like to show the difference on blackbody intensity in various stages in blender, and multiple scatter bounces.
In blender, not using temperature as temp input but heat, so a bit different in shading compared to Houdini, but I like that look, but will experiment more with combined materials.
Not showing LW samples from that vdb, because it´s sooo slow to render, and not as accurate either to setup with gradients for emission and scatter, and also the lack of multiple scattering.
Both blender and Houdini has a paus button for the interactive rendering..Lightwave has not, always refreshing if something is changed..from start with is soo annoying.
the lw team didn´t take notice of that practice, even though they should have done that with the fprime background innovative interactive renderer.
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