STEALING FEATURES: (What features should LW STEAL from the competition?)

#1

We don’t live in a vacuum. Lightwave is just one fish in an ocean of 3D apps, and to ignore what they are doing right is not healthy. And trust me there is a lot of BIG fishes.
[size=1]
So in order to clear the air, I have taken the liberty of posting a series of threads where we can spotlight ideas/tools/functionality that would be cool if we could “steal”/copy for Lightwave.

The idea of this thread is to provide an one stop place where developers (from Newtek, or independent) can come in and get ideas.

The titles and links for the threads are below.[/size]

STEALING FEATURES: SOFTIMAGE (What Soft features should LW STEAL?)
STEALING FEATURES: MAYA (What MAYA features should LW STEAL?)
STEALING FEATURES: 3D Studio MAX (What MAX features should LW STEAL?)
STEALING FEATURES: Alias Motion Builder(What M Builder features should LW STEAL?)
(More will be added later depending on the success of this thread.)

RULES:
[ul]
[li]KEEP IT POSITIVE[/li]No “slamming”. A person might disagree with you and that is OK. There is no need to make a Sicilian vendetta out of it.
[li]STAY ON TOPIC[/li]Please stay on target.
[li]NO WHINING. [/li]This thread is not intended to show us that beautiful axe you have been grinding. If Newtek kidnapped your family and burned your house to the ground, we don’t care.
[/ul]Looking forward to your ideas.

#2

What about node based texturing like in messiah, looks cool to me.
Ofcourse full edge modeling tools and edge weights like in modo.
Brush based modeling tools like zbrush, better support for the displacement maps system.

#3

LW should steal the layer palette (and stability) from Photoshop
The real-time cloth from Cinema 4D (THE most fun!)
Sub-poly displacement (C4D again)
Built-in SSS (er… C4D)
Ditch the crappy dynamics and integrate Impact 3 instead
The edge and point bevelling of modo
N-gons (modo, C4D)
The native After Effects and Photoshop multipass file output from C4D
The realtime organic sculpting of ZBrush (or at least some element of it) :slight_smile:

#4

They should steal the ability to paint or project right onto images as found in Zbrush or body paint. This would defintely complete LW.

#5

How about “adopt, copy or emulate” - “steal” sounds so deviant. :slight_smile:

#6

I agree with everything Darth Mole said except the Photoshop deal because I love LW’s Surface Editor and I think it’s one of LW’s highlights:) . But - I particularly agree with these that are in most need:
NGONS (max?, maya, cinema 4D)
EDGE support (cinema 4D, modo)
SUBPIXEL DISPLACEMENT (cinema 4D)

#7

Something like Project Messiah’s “flex tools” would be a great addition to LW for charcter animation. :bounce:

#8

Perhaps make parts of LW open source, and see some tremendous speed enhancement in development (but ofcourse, still a commercial application with pay pr liscence).

Just check out the latest point release of Blender and all the new features it has… its becoming tremendously powerful as a 3D application:
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Blender_2_36.384.0.html

#9

LW should definetly steel the fur and hair system from XSI or maya cuz saslite and sasquatch suck…it would be cool to have better particle effect tools like fluid dynamics or something from maya or realflow…put realflow in lightwave lightFlow yeah…

#10

I miss some easy, cool special effects like water, fire, liquids, gelly and different gasses.
And I agree that sasquatch sucks, mine does not even work.

#11

We don’t have a seperate thread for programs I want some features “stolen” :slight_smile:

Texture deformer using bones: Messiah
Subpixel displacement: Messiah
Hair: XSI

I am a new features freak. I am not putting them all here :slight_smile:

#12

What I would like to see besides n-gons is increased number of points per poly, to make boolean subtracting easier. It would be nice to beable to boolean subtract an extruded disc from a sub’d object as an example for n-gons.

Silk

#13

you do know that max n-gons suck dont you. they dont work. sure you can make em but u only have to make them 4 side right after or ur mesh will look like crap.

#14

Joe Alter helped develop the integrated Hair/Fur system for XSI and as you know he created Shave and a Haircut for LW several years ago … but then there was some bad blood between him and Newtek and that was the end of that. He went on to develop for Maya, Cinema4d and XSI. :shrug:

#15

I am a long time lw user that has just recently started to use/play with Zbrush 2.0. It is an incredible program that really does redefine the way that I do 3D or thought that it could be done. But the one idea that I think could be “stolen” from zbrush and incorporated into lighwave fairly easily is PROJECTION MASTER.
This tool used in LW combined with a plugin to link it up to a 3rd party paint program like PSP or Photoshop would be the bomb for lightwave. Then, UV mapping truly would be incorporated easily and well into lightwave and you wouldn’t have to take all the time to set up your model for screen grabs using the printscreen key for crying out loud…

I would love to see this in lw, and the idea of the renderer “cutting off” all of the parts of the models not shown… before rendering the scene and therefore not rendering stuff that can’t be seen… that is a pretty bomb-diggity idea as well.

I love lw and will probably always be first and foremost a LW user but dangit, some of these other programs have gotten some stuff seriously right! Nice idea for a thread!

Regards,
Half

#16

No douby Hafling as far as other people having some things seriously right… I had a “pissy” LW week pretty recently… It really makes me wonder if you know…

#17

their aggressive marketing strategies.

esh

#18

No douby Hafling as far as other people having some things seriously right… I had a “pissy” LW week pretty recently… It really makes me wonder if you know…

Say what???

I don’t understand what you mean at all, perhaps some clarification :)…

-Half

#19

I used XSI for a couple of months on a contract gig at a post house and I really liked some of it’s features.

  1. the dope sheet can be opened up into individual channels for anything that is keyramed. It is also in the same window as the animation curves so you can easily go back and forth.

  2. the texture editor (called render tree) in XSI was great and gave incredible flexibility.

  3. Sub-polygon displacement. I NEVER use lightwave displacement because the mesh has to be insane to get detail in it. There are a few projects I’ve worked on where I had to model something I could have easily used a displacement map on.

  4. render passes. in XSI you can set up a pass to include or omit any channel of any object. then you can make several other passes that include or omit channels and just choose which of the passes you want to render at that time. Makes rendering and compositing much easier.

  5. Sub division surfaces. I always get it backwards but I think LW uses subpatches and I found subdivision surfaces easier to control. The option of either or would be nice.

  6. flipbook. It’s simply a player for image sequences. it works great to see your animation inn realtime without opening aftereffects.

  7. Finally, Make the folders for me when I set a new content directory. Use a project manager if I have to but I hate having to make my own folders everytime I want to start a new project.

#20

What about the NURBS of Maya? I’ve modeled a lot with Maya in the last time… the NURBS -tools are very nice for characters for example. And curve-modeling for cars, is so easy! lw-splines: :banghead: