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Lightwave: First ImpressionsHere in this forum, I want to give my impression of what it is like to own my first higher end 3d modeling, rendering and animating software. The price is quite more expensive than other modelers I have owned. In this forum, I have reviewed such modelers as TrueSpace and Carrara and I have never paid more than a couple hundred dollars for any modeler, animator, renderer or any 3d software.So what do you get for nearly $1,500 ?Answer, if you are looking for just a basic modeler, renderer and animator, you can do the same or better with any of the less expensive modelers. Feature for feature, you can often find many of the same features and more in software packages such as Carrara, Blender, Art of Illusion, TrueSpace, Amapi, all of which I have and absolutely love, and many of these modelers you can get absolutely free of charge. Carrara 8 (I have the 64 bit version, the more expensive version, called the Professional version) costs hundreds of dollars rather than thousands and has a huge array of features. But there is, of course, the prestige of owning a higher end modeler, and even this is certainly not the highest end modeler especially when compared with Autodesk 3D Studio Max, and Maya which can run $3000 to $5000 for a single license. But, like the high end software packages, this software does have the prestige. This is one that is used by the "big boys"; high end studios, such as Walt Disney, Lucas Film, and many others. This software is used in major motion pictures and television programs for the realistic animations and for many of the special effects you see in movies. If you see it in the movies or on television, chances are it was 3D Studio Max, Maya, or Lightwave that it was created and rendered in.And this software is built with big studios in mind, rather than for a single one man ( or woman) studio, although a single person can certainly use the software. You are paying for the capability of running up to nearly 1000 cores of processing power for complex animation renders. You are paying for the name and the marketability of the things you can create with this software. If you go to a professional modeling website which sells high quality meshes for professional studios, you don't find much with the .cob TrueSpace format, or .car for Carrara, or even .cr2 for Poser formats. Most models are sold in .max or .3ds, formats which are 3D Studio Max and in .lwo and .lws format with is Lightwave format, and there are a few other formats, such as .fbx -- all high end modelers. You are paying for big studio power and level of professionalism.The Lightwave software package comes with two parts. The Layout program, where you assemble all your modeled objects to create a scene, rig characters (that is, give them skeletons, for animations), and render single images and/or movies, and add special effects. The second part is the Modeler, where you actually do your modeling, where you can create figures and objects from scratch, edit existing objects, apply texturing (although you can also do this in the Layout program too.), and build basic skeletons for figures. These are actually two separate programs, but you can link them together with something called a Hub program where you can switch between programs, send finished models to the Layout from the Modeler, and synch them together. Most other modelers, on the low end, such as Carrara, have modeler, layout, and rendered all integrated together in a single program. Again, since this software is made for major studios, this type of system makes sense, since a major studio would likely have a single team using the software for building the models, and another team for doing the actual building of the scene and another team for the actual animations and special effects. They would only use the particular program that is suited for the job they would do.People who have older versions will know that in order to use the full features of the software that you had to have a special key called a dongle. This served primarily as an anti piracy device, since you cannot use the software unless you have a legal registry number and the dongle as a sort of key. The dongle was a device that you could install into a USB port, and as long as you had the key in the computer, you could use the software and all of its features. But in the newer versions (I think above 11.3) the dongle has been discontinued, and all you need now is just the license number and to register your copy of the software. But you have to register to actually get the license number. The serial number you get with the software, if you get CD or DVD is not the same as the license number. So registering and activating your software is a little more involved.I bought the original disk media version which was the 32 bit version of Lightwave 11.0, and registering it and using the dongle was a bit of a nuisance. But when you go to register your software and make an account online with NewTek, as long as you have Lightwave 11.0 or above, you can get a free upgrade to the latest version of Lightwave, which is, as of this writing, 05/31/2014, Lightwave 11.6. I downloaded and got the 64 bit version for use with my computer.Lightwave 11.6 has all the latest features, including enhancements on its special effects machine, such as hypervoxels, which are similar to metaballs, but more dynamic. You can use these for such things as flamethrower effects, dynamic explosive effects, liquid effects and so forth. It also introduced soft body and cloth simulators, which the earlier 11.0 version did not have, in addition to its hard body dynamics and physics engines . You also have dynamic hair and fibers, morph targets, and skeleton editing, and kinematics and inverse kinematics. There is also more import and export capability. You can import .fbx (Filmbox) and .dae (Collada) objects and a couple of other mesh formats into either the Layout or Modeler, .3ds, .max, .dxf , .obj, or many other popular formats. You have a little more export capability, and you can export to .3ds, .obj, and .dae, and a few other formats.I have been going through the .pdf manuals and playing around with the software, and here I will give my first impressions of it.The interface is pretty straightforward in both the Modeler and Layout. And you can quickly find features and can often guess without too much thought what some things do. Unlike many modelers, Lightwave is more menu driven rather than icon driven. In other words, you can actually read what the buttons actually do instead of trying to figure out by the image what a button does.The Modeler appears to be primarily a polygon modeler with emphasis on subdivision techniques. (Some modelers specialize in a particular type of modeling. Some modelers, for example, specialize in NURBS or spline curves for creating objects, others specialize in subdivision, some modelers can model in a wide range of modeling techniques including both subdivision and NURBS, some are sculpting modelers, etc.) But you can draw and create spline curves for use with such things as lathing and extrusion. And you can create NURBS like patches with the spline curves, by joining curves together and building a series of polygons between them. And metaballs and metaball like objects are supported. There is something called a "metaedge" tool in which you can create metaball type objects of various shapes.Of course, it comes with basic tools for modeling objects, including drawing tools, spline curves are already mentioned, Bezier curves, simple polygons, etc. There are various types of extrusion tools. Path extrusion is supported as well as lathing. It has a rather comprehensive list of point editing tools, a few I have never seen before, such as a stencil tool, which can create on a polygon surface a polygon version of text, logos, symbols, artwork, etc, this in lieu of using a texture map or a decal. Of course, you can move position, rotate, and size entire objects or parts of objects, including faces and polygons, edges, and points (vertices). There are twist, bevel, tools. You can create text objects. Booleans are supported. There is a whole range of polygon, point, and edge manipulation tools where you can add, delete edges, faces, points, and modify geometry in various ways.Subdivision modeling is fully supported with two basic types and various types of smoothing geometry tools, as well as tessellation, and triangulation tools.UV mapping and other types of texturing tools are supported and allow a wide range of manipulation of surfaces for figures. And there is also a painting tool for doing various tasks such as weight painting for skeleton figures, to adjust the influence of bones on a mesh and surface color painting."Skelegons" is what lightwave calls its rigging tool, which is used for making skeletons or bones of animated characters. "Luxigons" is a tool used to turn all or parts of polygon objects into luminous objects i.e. light sources. "Powergons" can be used to execute various tasks using polygon objects such as manipulating lights, etc.You can create complex hierarchical objects in the modeler, which Lightwave calls "layers".The Layout program is just what its name implies. It is where you create your layout. You and insert objects that have already been modeled and arrange them and create a scene. This is also where you can do final setup of animated characters, pose them, animate them, and so forth. This is also where you can create particle effects, to create such things as smoke, fog, fire, and the like. We have already mentioned hypervoxels and physics effects. It also has a flocking tool, which for animations, simulates the actions of large groups of objects, such as a flock of geese, or a herd of elk, or a squadron of fighter planes. I have not yet tried any of these tools yet, so I cannot yet say how these work or how realistic the effects are. The Layout is also where your renderer is located.The renderer is first rate. It is certainly capable of absolute photorealism. I loaded preset scenes of a model car and World War II planes into the Layout room and rendered it using just basic settings. Even in basic settings Lightwave rendered the scene very realistically. There is a reason why Lightwave is used for professional movies and television. The renders are certainly the kind you can use in movies and television. The renderer supports lens flares, caustics (light through transparent objects,) radiosity (diffuse light), shadows, soft shadows, ray tracing, reflections, refraction.I have only started to work with this software, so I am still very new to it. But this is my first impression of it. I will provide updates and revisions as I learn more about this software and begin using it.One last word, if you are new to 3D modeling, you will need to look for tutorials, if you want to know how to build objects in 3D. I myself have some experience in modeling, and learned much about modeling just by playing with this and other 3D software, so I never needed much with tutorials, although for TrueSpace, when I first started learning modeling, I did get Frank Rivera's book on TrueSpace (reviewed in this forum), as a sort of tutorial to help learn some aspects of that software and 3D modeling in general. But if you are the sort that needs some pointers, the Lightwave site and a few other sites have tutorials that will help you get started in learning how to do modeling. I think there are tutorial books on Lightwave as well. The .pdf manuals, that come with the software cover the tools and their uses, but the manuals do not contain much instruction as to how to model objects.

My son used it to make cover art for my six novels. Got great feedback.

This software worked great for allowing me to finish 35 special effects scenes in my UFO expose film "Children of the X-Files". With a built in compositor, it handled all my integrations into live action backrounds. With front projection mapping, I was able to roto over live action actors and matte alien creatures seamlessly over them so the interaction was realistic beyond all expectations. It took two weeks to go through the manual top to bottom....no need for year long studies at an overpriced 3D graphic design school. This is a great buy!