How good is Lightwave?

[morphicity]

Hello Lightwave people!

 

My company are currently looking to make the big leap into the 3D market, and are presently struggling with the age old question of which software to use.

 

Looking around it is plain that 3ds Max/Viz have the largest following in the arch vis community, but Lightwave is so competitively priced (especially with the current pre version 8 deals).

 

I just wondered if anybody out there could present some of the pros and cons of the program for this type of work

 

many thanks

[Charles Gaushell]

Well, my company, Paradigm Productions, has been using Lightwave since 1992. We primarily do architectural visualizations, but it is great for the other projects we work on too.

 

You won't get as much support for architectural direct plugins, but it is certainly poweful out of the box and there are a ton of free plugins available. PLus, you get unlimited rendering nodes for free (so you can build a render farm without having to pay for a copy for each computer that is a render dummy).

 

I think Lightwave has a really nice soft edge and great pixel depth.

 

Quite frankly, a good artist can put any of the quality programs to good use. You are going to have to review price versus usability. Lightwave clearly wins.

 

Check out fprime for Worley Labs as a plugin worth the money.

 

There are strong opinions on each side, but I prefer Lightwave for many many reasons. Who knows where things will go 3 years from now.

 

You can see our stuff at http://www.2dimes.com

 

Regards,

Charles T. Gaushell, AIA

Paradigm Productions, LLC

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

for rendering and animation we currently use 3dmax, but we used to use lightwave. we switched to max for a couple of reasons. the i.t. dept. liked it because it further unified our company by going with a product made by autodesk. currently all of the workstations in our company have ADT on them, but they are configured to look like standard autocad. this keeps the average joe from getting confused, and needing training right away. eventually we plan on using ADT to do our base modeling. this will allow everyone on the floor to create models. we are going to have to put strict standards in place, which we have not had a chance to do. ADT has some version of Viz in it. the people on the workstations can do simple renderings. then the models will be handed off to our visualization team. we are using Max supplemented by FromZ for modeling. we grew up on FormZ, and find it to valuable of a tool to let go of. you can see that our goal is to tie our 3d visuals, drafting, presentation, aniamtions, ect... all into one stream lined system.

 

the other main reason for switching to max was the abundance of user plug-ins. mainly third party renders, Vray imparticular. but this may not be such a big deal since Vray is finally starting to expand their market.

 

the really nice thing about lightwave, besides how cheap it is compared to Max, is how light it is on the workstation. Max is more resource and memory hungry than Lightwave ever was. I had a $120 Gefroce 4 card, and it performed well with Lightwave. Max chugs with anything less than a much more expensive Quadro card.

 

if i could choose an ideal system to work on, it would be Lightwave, with all of the plug-ins that max has. if Vray made a lightwave version, imho that would be the hands down choice to go with.

 

...other things i liek about Max, that Lightwave does not do, at least to the best of my knowledge. DWG File Link, makes working between FormZ and Max a breeze. Reference objects. Makes managing scene asets a snap. Also, 3dmax's shaders are more sophisticated, which can be a good thing and bad thing.

 

...things i like about Lightwave over Max. Content Directory!!! keeps all of the files for a scene together nice and neat like. runs smoother than max.

 

i don't know if this helped, but hopefully it gives a little insight in to working with either one.

[ingemar]

Well, as you are saying, it's the age old question. And there's probably no simple answer. My company is using both Viz and LW, but my main work has been in LW. What I like with LW is the speed and the fast feedback when you model. I often make early sketches and the speed of the modelling is fantastic. I missed parametric objects before but now I rarely need them. Handling big scenes in LW is, as mentioned before, less demanding of the computer. (And RPC objects has really slowed down Viz scenes for me). Renders are easy to make good looking and photorealistic. Filtering of the textures are one of the things I like compared to Viz or C4D - it just looks right without any tweaking. GI is good and simple but too slow for interiors, and a few more settings could be nice. Unlimited render nodes makes that less of a problem considering the difference in price between LW and Viz+VRay/Brazil. And FPrime (real-time rendering) is a real time-saver for setting up scenes.

 

My main problems with LW is that no decent instancing is possible in Modeller. You can't change one object and have all the others update as well. I'm not sure how well this functions in other programs (what about surrounding geometry?) but sometimes I sorely miss it. There is no support for IES-lights. And last but not least: There's no snapping!

 

ingemar

[morphicity]

Thank you all for your feedback - it's been very useful to hear of other peoples experiences.

 

if anybody else has anything to say I'd be more than happy to hear from you