Any lightwave users here?

[EsHrA]

i am.


mlon

[ctguitars]

Hi Mellowfellon,
Me too too. Started at LW 8 as a crossgrade. I must confess I havent been using it as much as I should have been. Too many other toys. I am a recent Blender person, started at it about 4 months ago. It has taken me over :) - Also use Realsoft 3D alot and a bit of Truespace 7.5 [ upgraded to this to see the new Char Anim stuff etc ]. Started out originally on TS.


Cheers
aidan

[MellowFellon]

Are you just playing around or have you made some progress in terms of using it in a project?

[EsHrA]

im using it on projects but lw is still my main app, i find blender often too finnicky.


mlon

[Tartiflette]

I -was- a LightWave user until recently (9.2 to be exact...)

But i find Blender to be just more "inline" with what i do and the way i use a 3D app, so i use it exclusively in conjunction with Yaf(a)Ray, Sunflow and Radium when i need renders that Internal Blender render engine cannot do.

Blender rocks ! :)


Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :)

[MellowFellon]

Can you describe some of these issue's you have experienced? Interested to hear.
M

[dogsdinner]

I'm a Lightwave user and was wondering if any of you guys ahve used Blender to do character animation? How does it compare to LW, i can't imagine that it can be any worsehttp://forums.cgsociety.org/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=4447148#

[gauravanim]

used lightwave 6.5 in 2003

then after that i hooked to blender

[MellowFellon]

Of Topic:
where is the bridge tool?
:)

[FreakyDude]

it used to be under scripts, now it is under the F key. YAY!!

[lunat1k]

Count me in. Using the uvs and doing some fbx tests (still trying...).

[Tartiflette]

I'm a Lightwave user and was wondering if any of you guys ahve used Blender to do character animation? How does it compare to LW, i can't imagine that it can be any worsehttp://forums.cgsociety.org/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=4447148#
Yeah, I'm using Blender to do my Character Animation stuff as well...

Nothing too fancy yet, cos' i'm still learning the tools, but i've found them intuitive and effective so far. Plus i'd say that the performance of the solver is really good, making Blender usage for Character Animation a breeze ! :D

Anyway, go for it and try the tools, they're here at your disposal and not too difficult to stand. Then you'll see the real power of Blender !


Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :)

[nickej]

I use both. Used LW since version 5, started using Blender about a year ago. I've done professional work in both, although no (human) character animation, just creatures.
I find the Blender animation tools to be flexible , powerful and more than enough for me, especially as I learn more and more about the way they interact.. I prefer its modeling tools, despite the fact that there are "more" in LW. Really, the only thing
I definitely prefer LW for is the rendering and volumetrics. The rendering in LW is much easier to get looking "juicy", where the basic render settings in Blender look dry and overly crisp. It's possible to get great renders out of Blender, but it's fiddly, with a lot of light resetting and usually I end up rendering elements for compositing and get it all together in post. Blender, of course, also has no volumetrics at all, much less anything of the power of hypervoxels or LWs subpoly displacements. If it even got some 2D particle tools that could fake stuff well, like ParticleIllusion, I'd be happy. I'm hopeful that the 2.5 rewrite of the basic management system will allow people to more easily hook in a voxel/volumetric system to Blender, so I'm more and more finding that I need other apps less.

[MellowFellon]

I m must say thanks to Samo, I have gotten some sucess out of rendering in blender (with yafray o course) I am trying blender, because the two window (modeler + layout) just does not suite my stile of working. Been with lightwave since version 7. But I am also finding blender quite suited to my kind of work, which is primarily arch viz. One thing I miss is modelling tools similar too lwcad in blender. Hopefully in the not too distant future....

[BeBraw]

MellowFellon: What are the main modelling tools you are missing? There's this ProCad script that might be useful for architectural modelling. Check it out at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=75139 .

[MellowFellon]

Well, I think I am missing those tools only because I dont know Blender well. Tools I am talking about, are tools such as engraver and profiler (lwcad) which are excellent. Have you used this cad script before?

[BeBraw]

I don't model architectural models a lot. I only peeked at the script during its early development. I think Google Sketchup is probably the best archiviz program for light modeling due to its nice snapping tools and simple user interface. Though Blender has quite decent snapping tools now. Although anything you can do in Sketchup is doable in Blender. It just requires different kind of thinking (edge loops, instancing and such).

Blender's curve system allows nice profile based modeling which can be useful for some special archiviz purposes (creating nice round facadés and such).

There's a nice script called Caliper which allows the user to add nice measurements to models by the way. http://www.blendernation.com/2006/05/06/cad-tool-caliper-script/

Check http://blender-archi.tuxfamily.org/Main_Page for more resources.

[lukasdesign]

always hopeing that sooner or later I can completly stick to blender.

Unfortunatly I have to do alot of still renderings with modells made in rhino or solidedge. both apps, blender and lw, are not ideal for this task because they can't handle iges or step. lightwave since 9.2 is out peforms much better in any render tasks, especially the lw 9.2 & fprime 3 combo is amazing! but blender is always just ONE step behind!!! now we have a kind of realtime preview rendering, unfortunatly only working with blenders internal render engine. shader nodes are there, uv mapping is great, the procedural shaders are easy to use...

I guess what blender needs to be MY app of choice only would be: integration of a professional renderman solution. so that the opensource fans can go for pixie etc and the pros that need support etc will be able to chose among 3dlight, air or pixar's Renderman. So we would have aperfect GI solution, a good render speed...

I'm lookig forward to blender 2.50 !

[MellowFellon]

Certainly blender has surpassed many doubts for me. I am hoping to produce some nice arch viz work with it. The Yafray renders I have gotten look beter to me than even 9.2 renders. And quicker too!! Very v-ray-ish!!

[lukasdesign]

yafray is not for me...high polycounts are not the what it likes best! that's for shure a task to be done by renderman! it outperforms everything else!

[MellowFellon]

Hmm but isn't it hard too setup? Is there currently a form of implementation of renderman for blender?

[harkyman]

There are a couple of projects, some pretty well along for getting from Blender to RM renderers. Of course, one of the Google Summer of Code projects that Blender snagged this year is a rewrite/expansion/etc of its render API, with a specific on a going out to the RM standard.

[lukasdesign]

I don't xpect it to be as seamless as in maya, but maybe something yafray like

[Tartiflette]

yafray is not for me...high polycounts are not the what it likes best! that's for shure a task to be done by renderman! it outperforms everything else!
What kind of things are you doing to make RenderMan essential ?

I ask this because on my MacBookPro with 1.5GB, i have no problem with scenes with a poly count of 3 or 4 millions...

I wouldn't mind being able to have the possibilities of displacement found in RenderMan and Reyes renderer though ! :thumbsup:


Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :)

[bonim]

Quick question. I'm brand new to Blender. Just downloaded it and am looking at tuts and user guides. Is the transition from Lightwave (I took a course in it a couple of years ago at a community college in Sacramento) relatively easy. I'm looking to make jewelery, clothing and morphs to market to the Poser user base.

Thanks for the help in advance. Second question: How powerful is Blender compared to the pricey modeling software such as Lightwave, Truespace, 3d Max, Maya etc. Can I "make a second income" with Blender as my modeling tool?

Sincerely
~ Boni ~

[fktt]

Quick question. I'm brand new to Blender. Just downloaded it and am looking at tuts and user guides. Is the transition from Lightwave (I took a course in it a couple of years ago at a community college in Sacramento) relatively easy. I'm looking to make jewelery, clothing and morphs to market to the Poser user base.
hmm.. well what sources have you allready checked out?

if youre willing to pay there are a few very cool DVD's out there as well :)
http://montagestudio.org/Montage%20Studio/DVDs.html is worth to check out, though you might want to wait a little, as the guy known to blender community as mr.bomb(the owner of the sites and the tutor in the dvd's) is working on a body modeling dvd as well and will have a bundle of those 2 dvds as an option as well, youll get it a bit cheaper too if you get the bundle :)
then theres one for advanced fluids stuff, though you might not be interested into that?
oh, allso plenty of blender books to browse from, just check in the blender.org e-shop :)

oh, and as allways, blenderartists.org forums are worth of a check all-so ;)

Thanks for the help in advance. Second question: How powerful is Blender compared to the pricey modeling software such as Lightwave, Truespace, 3d Max, Maya etc. Can I "make a second income" with Blender as my modeling tool?
modeling? sure.. :D though for rendering, depends, i guess, its not bad, but for animations, it might take long, depending what kind of stuff your trying to render.. :p

for jewelery id use yafray(or maybe the newer one, yaf(a)ray?) as the renderer, works well with blender, and as you might have read at this thread allready other renderers will be on their way too :)


edit: oooh, allmost forgot.. :D theres some keyboard shortcuts translator for people coming from lightwave to blender somewhere, ill see if i can find it :)

ahh.. here it is:
http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/2006/10/lightwave-to-blender-keystroke.html

[JSKURIAS]

One thing that people will never admit is that they're opting for Blender because it never felt good using illegal software. I'm not saying that all the respondents so far to this post are. I don't know them. I'm saying it's one of the reasons why many are switching to Blender.

C'mon, why would I use another app if I'm already an expert in a pro app like LW? What more could I possibly need?

Some even asks some advice what to go for, Blender or Max. Lol. As if going for Max will just cost you 10 bucks. Lol.

[bonim]

Well, I had a student licenced copy of Lightwave I was using at home, and since I was no longer a student and intended to use the software for professional purposes, I left it on my old machine to "NOT" use since I couldn't uninstall it.

Low in funds, so Blender is the right price, I just needed some reasurences that the program could model props and clothes for Poser (morphs as well eventually). The render engine, mat settings and animation are of no interest at this point. But the UV mapping is essential.

I also have old versions of Hash: Animation Master (boxed version given to me by a friend), Amorphium version 1.0, Wings 3d, Truespace 3.?(free version), Vue 5 Esprit, Bryce 5.5. (And of course Poser 6, and Daz/Studio for the models to create these products for).

I will probably use a combination of these programs since I have a working knowledge of Amorphium, Vue, 10 years with Bryce and Poser and am willing to learn the others if need be. I just found such a loyal following for Blender I needed to see if it could be a blessing for my needs.

(please excuse any typos, I'm visually impaired and don't always catch them).

Sincerely
~ Boni ~

[Polou]

A long time ago .....:) I started doing 3D with Blender. Then I went the Animation Master way... Spline thing.....
Animation Master was the ONE who really pushed me into animations. I think Animation Master is still the BEST to produce nice animations without breaking your bank.

My tool box: Blender, Animation Master, Vue, Bryce, Poser, Daz Studio, Lightwave and few more.......

Lightwave because I had/have a few friends using it and getting into projects.

Do I still use Blender? Yes.
Why..? Because I'm very impressed by it, it's getting bigger and bigger every year. The compatibility between Lightwave and Blender is rather good.

Long live Blender:thumbsup:

[brkn]

One thing that people will never admit is that they're opting for Blender because it never felt good using illegal software. I'm not saying that all the respondents so far to this post are. I don't know them. I'm saying it's one of the reasons why many are switching to Blender.

C'mon, why would I use another app if I'm already an expert in a pro app like LW? What more could I possibly need?

I'm sure that's got something to do with some people's reasons for choosing Blender, but Blender also has a lot more going for it than merely the fact that it's free. Off the top of my head there are a few reasons such as multi-res sculpt mode, fluid dynamics, integrated compositing, that don't exist in Lightwave, and for which Blender can be used as a replacement or just as complementary in the same workflow.

[nickej]

I've got full, pro licenses of Lightwave, After Effects Professional, Vue XStream, and Cinema 4D, as well as a bunch of other stuff that's too numerous to mention. I find myself using Blender more often than not for the simple reason that it does 99% of everything I need to do. Might I think otherwise if I were working in a big studio? Perhaps, but I'm not. I use the tool that's right for the job.


A big part of the fun of working in 3D is the challenge of getting the effect you need in a way that will answer the client's requirements and allow you to render it in a timely fashion. Most of the time what's called for isn't another bell or whistle, but a planned 2D composite. Heck, most of the Pixar blockbusters were produced before Renderman even had ray-tracing, so whether or not some application has a particular high-end, processor and render-intensive solution is irrelevant. I've mentioned that I love Lightwave for its render, but it isn't impossible to get the same effects with Blender.

[LetterRip]

One thing that people will never admit is that they're opting for Blender because it never felt good using illegal software. I'm not saying that all the respondents so far to this post are. I don't know them. I'm saying it's one of the reasons why many are switching to Blender.

C'mon, why would I use another app if I'm already an expert in a pro app like LW? What more could I possibly need?

1) As brkn noted most 'pro apps' don't have a comparable feature set to Blender unless you are comparing the most expensive versions or bundling a lot of plugins. The question isn't neccessarily an 'either or'.

2) A number of individuals have older versions of commercial applications - so it is a decision between the cost of upgrading or adding Blender to their toolset. While only some of Blenders current toolset is supperior to the best fully up to date commercial options; a lot of its toolset is supperior to commercial software that is a few years old.

3) If you want to do a project with other people it can save a bundle of money to use Blender versus purchasing a bunch of additional seats for everyone else. Also if you have Blender everyone gets a complete set of tools (ie not purchase a sculpting tool for one or two people and then compositing tools for one or other two people).

4) It may be someone who has access to the software package commercially at work; but would like to do freelance/personal 3D projects at home.

5) It could be a student who has a license expiring on their student version.

Some even asks some advice what to go for, Blender or Max. Lol. As if going for Max will just cost you 10 bucks. Lol.

Student versions of software are fairly cheap - so it isn't neccessarily 'pirates' (although I tend to suspect many of those asking 'foo or bar' as relates to software tend to be rather clueless individuals who are most likely going to download an illicit copy of some other software).

While peoples conscience bothering them about using illicit copys may account for a percentage of adoption - I doubt it plays nearly as large a factor as you seem to think.

LetterRip

[fktt]

well, i dont play much games anymore nowadays but i used to so, i know very well how easy it is to get "pirate-ware" and so i can say, i dont really care for that matter, i just like the idea behind open-source, and i just love blenders interface! :love:too lazy to waste my time doing things the long way :p (thats in my case, ofcorse ;))

[JSKURIAS]

I'm sure that's got something to do with some people's reasons for choosing Blender, but Blender also has a lot more going for it than merely the fact that it's free. Off the top of my head there are a few reasons such as multi-res sculpt mode, fluid dynamics, integrated compositing, that don't exist in Lightwave, and for which Blender can be used as a replacement or just as complementary in the same workflow.Well, there's a gauge that will finally stop people from comparing Blender to commercial apps. That is when they see Blender used in mainstream film productions with live actors. Or in full-lenght animations such as Pixar's Toy Story series. Or in tv broadcasts, ads as well as similar applications. You know what I'm talking about. LW has had many credits when it comes to these things I mentioned. Too numerous to mention, in fact. To me that would be the pinnacle for any 3d app. Until such things are possible with Blender, skeptics will always ask these comparative questions.

Broken, since you are one of Blender's main developers, I might as well ask. Is it still not possible to use Blender in large budgeted film productions? If not, why?

[LetterRip]

Well, there's a gauge that will finally stop people from comparing Blender to commercial apps.

Why would that stop such comparisons? I'm sure it would envite them even further.

That is when they see Blender used in mainstream film productions with live actors. Or in full-lenght animations such as Pixar's Toy Story series. Or in tv broadcasts, ads as well as similar applications.

The high profile projects I know of have required NDAs about their usage of Blender (modeling and uv unwrapping primarily). Blender only recently has become capable enough in animation and other aspects that it has become a viable option to the major commercial platforms so it will probably be a few years yet before it starts popping up in the credits of major pipelines.

LetterRip

[brkn]

Broken, since you are one of Blender's main developers, I might as well ask. Is it still not possible to use Blender in large budgeted film productions? If not, why?

Hehe, that sounds like one of those 'so when did you stop beating your wife?' questions ;).

For that you're going to have to define 'possible'. It's always been 'possible' to use Blender for film productions, it's not like there is code in Blender that detects if it's being used for a big film and immediately shuts down. It was possible for it to be used for previs on Spider-man 2 (http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/testimonials/animatics-for-motion-pictures/), it was possible for digital-graphics in Belgium to use it for VFX on the feature 'Friday or another day (http://users.skynet.be/mume//vendredi/technical.html), it's possible for manos digitales to use it for the feature Plumiferos (http://www.plumiferos.com/). While none of these could really be considered large scale big budget hollywood blockbusters, it does show that these sorts of things are indeed possible at least to that extent, and much more so these days as the software rapidly improves.

But for other things like broadcast, commercials, illustration, product visualisation Blender is being used all the time by all sorts of people. It's not often in the most high-profile of situations, nor is there a Blender marketing department paid to get the word out, so much of it you'd really only know about if you knew the people working on it or followed posts in the blender forums etc. I use Blender nearly every day alongside Max on all sorts of illustration, tvc projects etc at the studio I work at.

Like with any other piece of software, decisions about whether to use it or not involve many different variables - who's using it, what you want to do with it, how easy it is to accomplish a certain task, if there are skilled operators available or able to be trained, whether you want to stick to something familiar, etc. etc. and this can be different in every case. I personally have no idea why or why not Blender isn't being used in whatever project, since I don't know the specifics of those situations. I do think that Blender could use more publicity and marketing of the facts of its capabilities, so decision-makers have an accurate understanding of what it's capable of, but that sort of thing is easier said than done for a volunteer driven project.

[lukasdesign]

are the best way to promote blender! if enough people see what an application can do they will consider it. I guess (I'm not a programmer!) Blender might be easier to use in an high end movie production than for example Lightwave. Blender has a quite open structure so special plugin's needed for certain tasks can be done quite easily. Lightwave still has problems with the SDK, which s not completly accessible. I guess this is why the whole world i s using maya...but maybe in a future blender developers make blender attractive enough for the big production houses...and if not? well I don't care very much because for me Blender fits perfectly as it is... ok I admit it would fit even better with a nice integration of renderman (like in maya for example...) let's look forward and what blender 2.5 might bring to us and as a Lightwave user I'm also really curious what we will see during the 9.X cycle!

[LetterRip]

Large studios need

1) Commercial support
2) A large body of individuals skilled in the product so that if they are behind schedule they can 'throw bodies' at the project
3) Good pipeline integration

(among other things)

1 can be fixed relatively easy and while desireable a really large studio has enough in house expertise that they could do without it. I've heard of major studios dropping Blender from consideration for this reason.

2 takes time - for modeling; uv unwrapping; texturing; lighting; and rendering there is a reasonable pool to draw from - for rigging; skinning; animation; and effects there aren't enough animators that 'know' Blender for it to be feasible for large production houses. For smaller production houses that isn't as much an issue.

3 this is one reason Blender was dropped from usage in the later spiderman movies previz - Blender completely lacked support for critical formats - and especially animation support. Things are getting better but round tripping of animation is still iffy

On the feature side we still have an achilles heel for volumetric effects - especially smoke and flame which are used extensively for all sorts of FX work; and frequently used in pure animations (ie see 'The Incredibles'), also the flexibility of the currently integrated particle system is relatively weak compared to many of the commercial offerings (although integration of Jahkas work should fix that).

LetterRip

[bonim]

For me, I just want to be sure it can handle modeling and texturing props and clothes for Poser as well as create morphs for characters. If it can handle that. I'm happy. Thank you so much for all of this wonerful information. :)

[ysvry]

sure it can handle that , only problem that might occure is the strange naming convention poser uses.

[MellowFellon]

Does blender have some sort of spreadsheet editor or dopesheet which allows multiple changes at once?

[toontje]

Dope sheet: equivalent to NLA and Action editor.

About Blender being used commercialy: AFAIK, Blender was used by Neo Geo for broadcast stuff. So it has been used commercialy since version 1.8 already. So surely now (especially with the support of a production critical format like EXR) it must be production ready... but that is another discussion.

What I'm curious about is how does users of other commercial apps rate Blender for the fact that is has so much functionalities under one roof (like was said before: Node editor, game engine, fluid sim, sculpting, perhaps soon motion tracking etc etc)?

[MellowFellon]

Hmmm it does not seem to be the same. Lets say I have 50 spot lights, of which I need to change their strenght to 3, and light type to area. How would I go about this? In lw I would use scene editor or just select all the lights and change their properties (p).

I can select all the lights in Outliner but I cant seem to change the properties at the same time?

M

[BeBraw]

Hmmm it does not seem to be the same. Lets say I have 50 spot lights, of which I need to change their strenght to 3, and light type to area. As Copy Attributes (3d viewport header -> object ->copy attributes) doesn't offer option to copy that specific option, the only alternative may be to write a simple script to set the strength. That would take a couple of lines of code. Of course if you want to build nice user interface for this specific purpose, it might take a while. There may even be a script available for this already.

A simple version with exception handling:

import Blender
from Blender import Lamp as La, Object as Ob

obs= Ob.GetSelected()

for ob in obs:
try:
lamp= La.Get(ob.name)
except NameError:
print "not a lamp"
else:
lamp.energy= 3.0

[Tartiflette]

As Copy Attributes (3d viewport header -> object ->copy attributes) doesn't offer option to copy that specific option, the only alternative may be to write a simple script to set the strength. That would take a couple of lines of code. Of course if you want to build nice user interface for this specific purpose, it might take a while. There may even be a script available for this already.

A simple version with exception handling:

import Blender
from Blender import Lamp as La, Object as Ob

obs= Ob.GetSelected()

for ob in obs:
try:
lamp= La.Get(ob.name)
except NameError:
print "not a lamp"
else:
lamp.energy= 3.0

Great example !

Another possibility is to use the Object Oriented feature of Blender and use 50 times the same "LA" object, then to change the "LA" types and attributes to whatever you like ! :)


Cheers,
Laurent aka Tartiflette :)

[MellowFellon]

I also would like to "router' or extrude to curve type of thingy. Is there something similar in Blender?

[BeBraw]

I also would like to "router' or extrude to curve type of thingy. Is there something similar in Blender? I am not familiar with the "router" tool but I think following tools might be close to it:
Tools for curves:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Curves/Curve_Taper
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Curves/Making_A_Tube
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Curves/Extrude_Along_Path

With mesh you might want to try out the curve modifier (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Curve_Modifier). You can even combine it with the powerful array modifier (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Array).

[MellowFellon]

Hmm Cool! YOu can use this to make cornices? What about the stencil tool? Does blender have this?

[BeBraw]

Hmm Cool! YOu can use this to make cornices? What about the stencil tool? Does blender have this? You can make cornices easily by using a curve profile and a bevel curve on it to describe the details of the cornice. I am sure that's not the only way but one that I find quite useful.

I took a look at Lightwave's stencil tool. I think something like that is doable with retopo (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Retopo) and boolean modifier (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Booleans). You can use retopo to project vertices on another surface. After projecting, just extrude and subtract the result from the target object. Note that booleans tend to produce messy geometry though. Sometimes a a couple of well placed edge loops can save some hassle in this regard though. Of course you won't need boolean subtract if you extrude outwards. :)

[Slapdash]

I'm a Lightwave user. I look into Blender every month or so to see how it proggresses. I did a a bit of stuff in it but I really can't get use to the UI. I know it's "if you take time to learn it, it will grow on you" and all that but... I find the way it works a bit frustrating.
I'm almost 100% sure that if the UI is changed to be more in line with regular apps that millions more will start using Blender. It really is a great app, bar the UI.

[harkyman]

The UI is a reflection of the paradigms behind the software itself. Tacking on, say Max or Maya's UI with key and button mapping would work up to a point, but you would really lose the unique efficiencies that are inherent to the way Blender works. Just like putting Blender's UI on those apps would be basically functional, but kill what makes them good.

[lgolden]

Ressurecting an old thread...

what your think about my idea posted in LW forum (and recieved without much care)???

I love LW renderer and love blender workflow

luis
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