Mac, ArchiCAD, Lightwave?

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

I am an architect, not a professional illustrator. I have been working with Artlantis up to now for making presentation illustrations and I am thinking of moving towards a radiosity-capable renderer --which I will be probably using an average of one hour a day. I had heard wonders of Cinema 4D and its integration with ArchiCAD, and was just about to purchase it when two days ago I checked the Lightwave architecture gallery (http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/lw-gallery/thumbnails.php?album=1) and was stunned.

 

Anybody can tell if the interface, integration with ArchiCAD, color-texture tweaking capabilities, 'camera sets' and 'material sets' import capabilities, speed, of Lightwave would work for a user like me? And anyone can draw any sort of pros/cons vis a vis Cinema 4D?

[IC]

Juan,

I can only offer the following:

LightWave, like most of the big 3d programs, imports a wide range of 2d and 3d filetypes. Materials are then easily assigned in a variety of ways including selcting layers(from the 2d file), or individualy selecting polygons, which is far easier than in any other program I've tried.

 

The material editor is very easy to use and very powerful. In fact the entire interface is very intuitive, regardless of what those who are used to using the 'Autodesk' family of products say.

 

Rendering is fantastic although every other package can (now) compete with it, and, to be honest, Radiosity is comparitively slow but that's becoming less of an issue with the appearance of the FPrime plug in.

 

If you create large scenes, LightWave really comes into it's own as it copes effortlessly with any amount of polys even on a low-ish spec machine.

 

As for comparisons with Cinema4d, they are probably pretty neck and neck but LightWave offers better value for mony as everything is included in one low price but you have to pay quite a bit for things like the advanced rendering functions in Cinema4d.

 

Hope that helps!