53 replies to this topic

[haikalle]

MattVG, on 08 December 2010 - 09:30 PM, said:

Oh, I guess I didn't realize V-Ray had a standalone version. That's quite tempting. Maybe I'll spend my money on a decent external renderer instead of a new modeling and animation package. There's also a V-Ray-Blender plugin in development.

You can go here http://blender.bevice.ru/ and download the vray/blender script. It already support many features
like normal,disp, sss (you can use texture to contol it), animation, etc... For me the most important area is rendering
and I'm ready pay for it. And V-Ray renderer is top notch at the moment. With this combination I know that I have paid only
for features that I really need. Nothing extra.

[philnolan3d]

MattVG, on 08 December 2010 - 09:30 PM, said:

I can't speak for the liquid simulation but the smoke simulator is quite nice. For rigid body dynamics and such Blender uses Bullet. Blender seems to have a pretty decent simulation suite.

LW 10 also uses Bullet physics. Also, while it is a plugin, Turbulence 4D also does some pretty nice smoke and fire in LightWave. The author is planning to add a liquid shader to this as well.

Examples:
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=RWpI3EFaxu0
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=vkJ3NmuyMMU
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=UvI3wmICnkE

[Ghostdog]

I nominate this thread for "Best discussion of multiple platforms held in a constructive manner without any participants getting burnt by flames"

[geo_n]

MattVG, on 08 December 2010 - 09:30 PM, said:

I'm still exploring the shallow end of the Blender animation pool so I'm not yet aware of just how strong the animation toolset is. It's good to know the LW animation system is fairly basic, but perhaps that'll change with version 10.

@geo_n: Here's the product comparison for C4D. They add and drop various features based on the perceived function. For instance, you don't get dynamics or thinking particles outside of the Studio version.

It won't change in lw 10. The only changes in lw 10 are those announced features like vpr, geometry cache, linear workflow, etc. Nothing in the animation department. Theres some people selling lw for less than 400US at newtek. Check it out.

Just as I expected, c4d is still crippling their versions. The renderer has been very crippled in the other versions. But thats ok the renderer of choice for c4d is vray anyway. But no dynamics, limited mograph, thinking particles. Too bad.

Blender plus vray. Probably a very good idea as well. Modern 3d software with best in class renderer. If you don't exchange files with other people to work with, like in a studio, you don't really need maya,3dmax,c4d,xsi,lw to produce your own final work.

[philnolan3d]

Of course one thing to consider as well, is the unknown. What kind of free updates might come with the purchase you make over the course of the year or whatever until the next paid update comes? Remember when 3D-Coat 3.0 was released and people bought in voxel sculpting and the new UI were brand new features. Think of all the updates that have come since then. Now with Andrew we're lucky and get lots of updates before version 4 comes and we have to pay up again. Some other apps may not get many free updates or none at all.

[Javis]

As a "former" lightwave user (I still use modeler), I wont be saying much nice about it. Personally, there are far too many gotchas that will simply hinder your work flow. Phil mentioned Craig Monin's RH training and RHiggit, which is great, but only partially fills one of the many serious gaps of LW.

If I had to choose an application to learn these days it would either be XSI, Modo & Messiah (Messiah with another application for modeling, like Silo/Wings). My recent switch from Messiah led me to Messiah, as it's a great application for character work, rigging/animation, shading, lighting & rendering. I feel that Messiah is a great application in these areas.

If you have the money and don't mind Autodesk, than XSI is a great application. It's easily the best out there for ease of use and terms of features.

Modo is also pretty good, but I felt lacked in the character tools section.

[geo_n]

He is only looking at mac. Doubt he's open to bootcamp. That narrows it down to c4d, lw, blender, maya. AD soft would have been the best choice on windows. I wouldn't count modo since it doesn't have features of the other animation packages. its a good modeller though. Messiah on the other hand I've only heard on mac that's its very problematic but on windows its THE animation companion for lw. Thinking of picking it up myself but I don't have time to learn another application when 3dmax and lw are already a handfull.

Here's a link to some seller at newtek. Very very cheap for a pro application.
http://www.newtek.co...isplay.php?f=54

[AbnRanger]

How does the student to commercial upgrade work? Is it like Adobe products, when you buy EDU software, IT IS the commercial version...just at a significant student discount? LW used to have a killer competitive crossgrade ($395-$495), but I'm not sure where the distinction lies with the EDU license and the commercial. Would you be able to participate in the HardCORE program and all?

I hope that Turbulence plugin isn't going to be another one like "Dynamite"...that essentially had the developer go awol on his customers. Turbulence would answer a problem I have had with HyperVoxels. I can spot when they are used on TV...it's substandard (in my estimation) and in big need of an overhaul. Perhaps it just needs better fractal noise algorithms, and finer control of them. That is the difference I have noticed between the two "Voxel/Volume" FX plugins for Max....Afterburn and PyroCluster.

I'm really impressed with LW 10's VPR, and am really tempted to get in on that deal and use LW for surfacing and rendering, especially when using Vue XStream. I can do all my modeling and Character Animation in Max. I really like FinalRender (3rd party renderer for Max...on par with VRay), but the Interactive Renderer has been very crash-prone...and therefore nearly useless for me. LW seems to offer the least gotcha's and limitation now.
The only last concern I have is instancing. I see that you can do it in CORE, but I would like to be able to do some instancing in LW 10 if I needed.

[philnolan3d]

Yes the commercial and Edu versions are exactly the same, the only difference is the license and the price, what you're allowed to use it for. I didn't have to do anything special to upgrade to commercial, I just got the next update and it was the commercial one.

Turbulence is €299, which is currently about $396 USD with free upgrades.
http://www.jawset.com/purchase.php

Hypervoxels aren't all bad though, I think they did a great job with them on Iron Man and that nuke explosion on 24.

[haikalle]

I have been looking modo a lot lately. It has a very powerful modelling tools and also it has a great renderer built in. 501 should come in this month.

[AbnRanger]

philnolan3d, on 09 December 2010 - 08:18 AM, said:

Yes the commercial and Edu versions are exactly the same, the only difference is the license and the price, what you're allowed to use it for. I didn't have to do anything special to upgrade to commercial, I just got the next update and it was the commercial one.

Turbulence is €299, which is currently about $396 USD with free upgrades.
http://www.jawset.com/purchase.php

Hypervoxels aren't all bad though, I think they did a great job with them on Iron Man and that nuke explosion on 24.

I really think Newtek is hurting themselves by not stating what outside customers can expect with CORE when it is released. I would be much more inclined to make a purchase (regardless of what type of license...EDU or Commerical), if I knew they were working on CA tools in CORE. I'm thinking it's worth going back to LW just for the renderer.

Do you know where that video went, where Graham Toms showing 3DC in use with LW 10....and it showed the enhanced polycount handling capability in Layout? It seems to have disappeared. I wonder why?

Ah, snap! I just noticed that FinalRender 3.5 has just been released. It's half the upgrade cost for me (not real happy about that) Again, it's the tight integration LW's VPR has with it's renderer that makes it so tempting for me. I talked to Edwin (the head at Cebas) at their booth during SIGGRAPH and he seemed to blame Autodesk for the problems with their IPR. That's not going to help me get the job done...but outside of the IPR, I love the renderer. Tough choice to make...

http://www.cebasstat...ot_news&nid=394

[philnolan3d]

It was stated that the first version of CORE would not focus on animation because modeling is needed before animation can begin. I don't know about that video, it's weird, it's been removed from YouTube as well.

[geo_n]

AbnRanger - you should switch to vray as we did. The next version 2.0 has cpu and gpu accelerated IPR system. Digital Domain uses vray a lot.
The EDU version of lw does not get you into HC. Someone asked that before at newtek. T4D will be around more than dynamite, the developer is selling his fluid sim for c4d so that should keep him financially well off than only for lightwave. Regarding instancing, dpont has made a free instancing solution for lw. Its almost as good as happydigital hdinstance which I also bought before. That saves people 300US. The new geometry cache feature in lw 10 also helps alleviate the need for pointoven. I have tested it and it works well to import mdd or pointcache files from max and lw, vice versa. So it has become cheaper for lw now with only maestro/rhiggit and lwcad as must have plugins.

[AbnRanger]

geo_n, on 09 December 2010 - 11:50 AM, said:

AbnRanger - you should switch to vray as we did. The next version 2.0 has cpu and gpu accelerated IPR system. Digital Domain uses vray a lot.
The EDU version of lw does not get you into HC. Someone asked that before at newtek. T4D will be around more than dynamite, the developer is selling his fluid sim for c4d so that should keep him financially well off than only for lightwave. Regarding instancing, dpont has made a free instancing solution for lw. Its almost as good as happydigital hdinstance which I also bought before. That saves people 300US. The new geometry cache feature in lw 10 also helps alleviate the need for pointoven. I have tested it and it works well to import mdd or pointcache files from max and lw, vice versa. So it has become cheaper for lw now with only maestro/rhiggit and lwcad as must have plugins.

How does VRay RT work for you? The equivalent tool in FR is it's Interactive Render, but it seems a much ignored feature...and in practice, I can see why. It's so crash prone, it's unusuable in production. If it weren't for that, I would be fine with the tools I have.

The one thing I really liked about it's IPR, is that it's the ONLY renderer for Max that allows you to get full blown interactive previews of volumetric FX plugins like Afterburn, PyroCluster and FumeFX. If only the da%#!@-ed thing worked without crashing! It's been that way for over a year now, and Cebas acts like they could care less.

I was a big Cebas fan for such a long time, but every since they worked with Uncharted Territory on the 2012 film, they haven't been the same. It's like they go into hiding until VRay comes out with a new release...then they feel obligated to respond. That's why they announced the release of R3.5 within days of VRay 2. Before that, there wasn't a peep from them on the forums, for months. I don't think Newtek could get away with that kind of support/interaction...so, that's why I'm suddenly leaning toward LW 10 for the task.

Mental Ray, as you know, doesn't work with Volumetric FX in Max, and iRay doesn't strike me as being nearly as efficient as FPrime or VRay RT, even if it does utilize CUDA enabledc cards.

[geo_n]

VPR is more along than vray rt last I tested it but that could change when vray 2.0 is released. Chaos group have more developers afterall. The best IPR solution is still fprime. You can't beat years of fine tuning and the pioneer of IPR...yet.

[AbnRanger]

geo_n, on 09 December 2010 - 12:37 PM, said:

VPR is more along than vray rt last I tested it but that could change when vray 2.0 is released. Chaos group have more developers afterall. The best IPR solution is still fprime. You can't beat years of fine tuning and the pioneer of IPR...yet.

VRay 2 it is, then...

[philnolan3d]

geo_n, on 09 December 2010 - 12:37 PM, said:

VPR is more along than vray rt last I tested it but that could change when vray 2.0 is released. Chaos group have more developers afterall. The best IPR solution is still fprime. You can't beat years of fine tuning and the pioneer of IPR...yet.

FPrime is nice but it has it's flaws like that it can't talk to any other plugins including shaders. Some other little things too.

[geo_n]

philnolan3d, on 09 December 2010 - 01:43 PM, said:

FPrime is nice but it has it's flaws like that it can't talk to any other plugins including shaders. Some other little things too.

I am testing vpr as of this moment and as a courtesy to newtek not to get specific details about lw 10, I can only tell you that fprime is still superior in performance and lw supported features. And vpr is still only an IPR while fprime, as I've mentioned in other threads, is a final flickerfree brute force renderer like vray but slower. Its the faster way to render animated flicker free gi deformation compared to lw native renderer which is super super slow montecarlo and Greg mutt was rendered in fprime http://www.youtube.com/user/GregMutt .

[AbnRanger]

geo_n, on 09 December 2010 - 02:47 PM, said:

I am testing vpr as of this moment and as a courtesy to newtek not to get specific details about lw 10, I can only tell you that fprime is still superior in performance and lw supported features. And vpr is still only an IPR while fprime, as I've mentioned in other threads, is a final flickerfree brute force renderer like vray but slower. Its the faster way to render animated flicker free gi deformation compared to lw native renderer which is super super slow montecarlo and Greg mutt was rendered in fprime http://www.youtube.com/user/GregMutt .

VRay(2) makes more sense for me, seeing that it has VPR/Fprime ability in RT, and you can switch between GPU mode or CPU mode (GPU may not always be best since it relies on the graphic card's VRAM).
http://www.youtube.c.../19/5rWEFcEKYVE

It also is supported by Vue Xstream...so that pretty much fills the need, without having to step out of Max entirely to render out the scene. FinalRender wasn't supported by Vue, and the darned IPR isn't stable enough to rely on...so that pretty much settles it for me. Thanks for the tip Geo. I wasn't sure RT was any better.

[Tom K]

philnolan3d, on 08 December 2010 - 11:44 PM, said:

LW 10 also uses Bullet physics. Also, while it is a plugin, Turbulence 4D also does some pretty nice smoke and fire in LightWave. The author is planning to add a liquid shader to this as well.

Turbulence does look amazing, but.. look how much it costs. That's what caught my eye. blender already has built in, what I would have to buy separate for Lightwave. I bought
the full version of Sasquatch when it first came out, but when I go to the Worley site, it seems like nothing much has changed with it. I also bought Shave and a haircut, and what a disappointing turn of events that turned out to be. It still seems like they don't have the capabilities that Shave had ten years ago.

Tom