Introduction of myself to the forum and some questions about Lightwave.

#1

Good afternoon all.

My name is James and I’m a freelance 3D generalist looking at Lightwave as a new package to learn. I come from an theatre design background and have primarily used XSI for the past 5 years.

In the near future I will be working on projects that require some compatibility with CAD files (dwg, dfx) and software that can measure distances in both English and Metric measurements. While I enjoy XSI it does have a severe limitation when it comes to the measurement system. This issue is moving me to look at new 3D applications. The work I will be doing will be both for pre-viz of shows and perhaps actual animations done as part of the show itself.

I have not been able to d/l a trial of version 9 from the official website yet, seems there is some site updates going on today. I will be looking for any video based tutorials (similar to Digital Tutors) to help me get started.

However before I look at purchasing Lightwave and any tutorials I wanted to ask this community at large if Lightwave has a good work flow with AutoCAD files and architectural pre-viz in general.

I also just wanted to stop in and say hello as I imagine I will be coming here fairly regularly in the near future.

Thank you for your time,

JamesCG
www.centerstage3d.com

#2

We model buildings in AutoCAD at work and export them into Lightwave. The trick is exporting the object from AutoCAD and have it be the right scale in Lightwave. We use AccuTrans 3D as our go between export import program. It can easily deal with other file formats such as .dxf and export them at the right scale as a .lwo for use in Lightwave. AccuTrans has lots of different features that come can come in handy. Check it out here http://www.micromouse.ca/index.html

#3

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