db&w Tools V1.0 for Lightwave are available for download now - supported platforms: Windows 32/64bit, OSX CFM and UB
This is the first version of a free set of LightWave tools from db&w.
Currently it only includes one node, but will be expaned in the future with more (or less) useful plugins.
The plugin is available in our downloads section (no registration required).
We hope you enjoy the (currently very humble) collection.
Cheers,
Mike
I hope you don’t mind me pointing to another thread on Spinquad:
http://www.spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19924
Basically the idea is to be able to mix and match shaders and materials (or parts of materials).
Cheers,
Mike
thanks, I think I get it now 
It’s one of those things that has held back my node dabbling…time to start playing…
I’ve finally got something that I wanted to use this node with & have a few things that I wanted to mention.
I wanted to blend a dielectric material with something more solid.
The first issue was blending them together. I eventually worked it out, I was looking for a simpler solution although I can understand why it might be set up in such a way. I used a weight map to blend between the materials. I expected a single “blend” input rather than plugging into the opacity of each materials property…it’s not a major issue but it might be something worth considering as changing the blend input node means re-connecting 5 inputs rather than 1. Keep the option of seperate opacity inputs but maybe add an overide.
The second issue is the speed of it. Rendering a 400,000 poly sub-patched figure with a dielectric material, ray-traced transparency, reflections, refractions & final gather at 640x480 took 3mins. Adding a standard material with no reflections or transparency & blending between the two increased the render time to nearly an hour. For blending completely between two materials it would actually be quicker to render them both seperately, render an alpha to blend between them & composite together afterwards.
Perhaps I’m missing the point of this node? I’ll continue to experiment & see if I can improve the speed a little.
[EDIT] The speed issue is because of something stupid that I’ve done, I added reflection blur to the surface which is the cause of the render increase. The render time seems to be just a little more than rendering both materials seperately which is what I’d expected.
The speed issue is something the node is not reponsible for… the user is 
But be aware that all materials hooked up will be rendered/evaluated.
The initial idea was to be able to separately control the different aspects of a materal. An override would also (imho) not fit into the nodal concept. You can just add up all your opacitices to a “Add Scalar” no for example and hook everything up to that.
Cheers,
Mike
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