nope i disagree with that wholeheartedly, maya pays for itself. you will realise this the more you use it in production. Its not about money since it all boils down to chump change when you consider how much money you can earn int he long run. its the best app to learn, for many reasons… Hell i spent more money on my car then i ever spent on maya. We have threads here how people want to pay MORE for messiah to get it more polished… you have to understand that you get what you pay for in the end…
LW vs. Messiah
Gitch
#38
What is the upgrade cost or license on Maya? maybe someday…I still like to model in Lightwave and Zbrush.
grgeon
#40
Attempts to bring it back on topic
Cool info Wegg. We are one of those considering a maya/lw pipeline. These results are intriguing though and we will now look into considering messiah as well.
Thanks and keep sharing the knowledge.
-George
TylerZambori
#41
yeah, I hope the discussion goes back to rendering in messiah.
On that note, nice work Wegg! There is a huge difference in quality on the renders and I’m amazed at messiah’s speed.
I am too, for sure.
kursad_pileksuz
#42
Messiah render is very capable, once messiah supports quantity objects rendering (things like fur+hair) it will be complete for the price, at least for the workstation version. All the render engines out there are more expensive than messiah workstation.
Once you start using multiple applications (most of them are full apps) for various reasons, things get very complicated because all those tools are designed for standalone pipelines ie lightwave or maya, also it gets very expensive. I mean messiah+lightwave+maya+mentalray= alot of money.
If you want modular approach, which i myself am a fan of, we need modular tools. I do not think that maya or lightwave are designed to be modular( playing nice with others). Especially i know that newtek changes .lws format frequently nowadays. How can you trust modularity between these apps?.
My main complaint about messiah render is the way it handles triangles, it is very painful to look at rendered polygon triangles in messiah render. If you have alot of them it looks very bad(Good aa solves many sometimes thou) . To me once this is fixed i personally would use it in all the production needs i have. Otherwise one does not have time and precision to model everything in quads all the time. This is not absolute, but it would be nice to support smoothing of triangles in nicer fashion (i am talking about smoothing angles).
LightWuv
#43
Nice, and thanks for the comparison, Wegg! 
Can I ask why you choose to render with the classic camera in Lightwave? Is the perspective camera giving you even higher render times, or more black dots?
Wuv
Wegg
#46
Perspective camera? Uhh. . . I had no idea. It looks like the Perspective camera renders transparency way better/faster than before. I also discovered that the PLD stuff was what was causing some of the quality issues. Switching to the Classic Reconstruction Filter resolved that but also negated any of the speed gains from the Perspective camera. 
An improvement though! In both speed and quality. Thanks for that tip.
(Man. People complain about Messiah’s settings being complex. . . Lightwave is . . . yea. . . )
I do agree with what Kursad said about the need for better quality on geometry that isn’t perfect. These purchased models are often created in Maya and the number of triangles and Ngons pose quite a challenge for Messiah’s renderer. Having to re-work those problem areas is a pain. Especially since these purchased models already have all their UVs and textures in place.
Gitch
#47
Wegg,
did you try a test between the perspective camera in LW and Messiah? Probably Messiah is still faster…
Wegg
#48
That is with the Perspective camera. Says it right in the info box. “Camera Type: Perspective” That with Classic, Enhanced Low made a much better image but its still 10:45 vs. Messiah’s 1:04.
Wegg
#50
Well because I wanted that “look” of it being light from both a directional “sun” light and the sky. I’m not about to start spinning lights “old school” style. And a big massive area light above the object wasn’t cutting it. Not when I get GI in Messiah for a fraction of the time.
Gitch
#51
Yes I can see it is the perspective camera I’am not blind (maybe that did not come out right the way I phrased it in the thread), I was just wondering the comparison which you have stated and which is still a sizeable difference.
Wegg
#53
Monte Carlo, 6 GI Samples, GI Depth 1, Auto Reduction on. By switching to the Classic AA setting I think I’m going to have to set the Messiah render to an AA level of 4. That added 35 seconds to the render time. But now the GI quality is kind of overkill. So if I lower that to 5. . . oops that increases render time. HA HA.
Wegg
#54
It looks like I can switch between GI Samples of 6 -> 8 and keep the same render time. 9 slows things way down and 5 also slows things down. I guess its harder for the AA part of Messiah to deal with the extra noise. . . and with 9 its just more rays that is slowing it down. With no GI and just a directional light the plane renders in 12 seconds in Messiah and 9 seconds in Lightwave. So if your happy with renders that don’t have that GI “Look” Lightwave seems to be faster. As soon as you throw in raytraced soft shadows and GI. . . Messiah kicks butt.
Dann-O
#55
Thanks for the GI settings. As a new Messiah user it is very helpful. Godo to know I have such great renderign tools now. I too would like to have messiah handle triangles and Ngons better. Particuarly for metanurbs. Boom!! but I can work with it. Havign a lot of fun with it and posted my first messiah render in the 3d still gallery. Messiah is not an option for software used in the pulldown menu. Just thought I would let you know.