Hi everyone! Nope, not dead yet! But as far as I'm concerned, LightWave is.
After six months of battle, tonight I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that LightWave 2019 is irretrievably broken and that Vizrt-NewTek is never going to invest the resources necessary to bring the old girl up to par. The new volumetrics system in LW 2019 has been giving me fits for weeks now--this is one of the reasons I disappeared from view just before Christmas. LightWave's OpenVDB support is aggravating and tetchy. The VDB and volumetrics pipelines into OctaneRender are poorly-documented and fraught with issues (but to be fair I also lay some of the blame at OTOY's feet for being unforgivably far behind on documentation; the Octane online docs are now three full versions out of date). The coup de grâce came tonight when--to work around NewTek's software deficits--I downloaded a recommended plugin to fix a problem I was having with visualizing dust clouds. The damn thing not only crashed Layout and corrupted my scene file, it looks like it's managed to hose the entire LightWave installation. ARGGGHHH.
This would all be bad enough, but I'm now looking around and realizing I'm one of a rapidly-shrinking handful of boomers left who's still tethered to this dinosaur. Modeler/Layout hasn't changed its destructive modeling paradigm or its antiquated schizoid user interface since I hopped on board in 2002 (that's right--my LightWave license is now old enough to vote, even though the software it's linked to is hopelessly antiquated). And that ancient UI, more than anything else, seems to be what's driven everyone else away. You just don't find the vast volume of third-party support and tutorials for LightWave that you do for its commercial competitors and Blender. Not only does this make it super-hard to learn and advance skills, it also all but assures that venturing into intermediate and advanced features is going to be fraught with difficulty (if it's not outright impossible). The writing's on the wall: everyone else is abandoning ship, and I'm finding it difficult to envision the future of LightWave as a going concern.
So that's it; I'm done. The Enterprise and Constellation will be the last big models that I create in LightWave. I have a perpetual license so I'll keep the software handy for rendering out the main ships (they're finished, so I might as well keep 'em). But everything else? The planet killer, the shuttlecraft, the destroyed planets, and everything beyond this project? Blender.
After six months of battle, tonight I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that LightWave 2019 is irretrievably broken and that Vizrt-NewTek is never going to invest the resources necessary to bring the old girl up to par. The new volumetrics system in LW 2019 has been giving me fits for weeks now--this is one of the reasons I disappeared from view just before Christmas. LightWave's OpenVDB support is aggravating and tetchy. The VDB and volumetrics pipelines into OctaneRender are poorly-documented and fraught with issues (but to be fair I also lay some of the blame at OTOY's feet for being unforgivably far behind on documentation; the Octane online docs are now three full versions out of date). The coup de grâce came tonight when--to work around NewTek's software deficits--I downloaded a recommended plugin to fix a problem I was having with visualizing dust clouds. The damn thing not only crashed Layout and corrupted my scene file, it looks like it's managed to hose the entire LightWave installation. ARGGGHHH.
This would all be bad enough, but I'm now looking around and realizing I'm one of a rapidly-shrinking handful of boomers left who's still tethered to this dinosaur. Modeler/Layout hasn't changed its destructive modeling paradigm or its antiquated schizoid user interface since I hopped on board in 2002 (that's right--my LightWave license is now old enough to vote, even though the software it's linked to is hopelessly antiquated). And that ancient UI, more than anything else, seems to be what's driven everyone else away. You just don't find the vast volume of third-party support and tutorials for LightWave that you do for its commercial competitors and Blender. Not only does this make it super-hard to learn and advance skills, it also all but assures that venturing into intermediate and advanced features is going to be fraught with difficulty (if it's not outright impossible). The writing's on the wall: everyone else is abandoning ship, and I'm finding it difficult to envision the future of LightWave as a going concern.
So that's it; I'm done. The Enterprise and Constellation will be the last big models that I create in LightWave. I have a perpetual license so I'll keep the software handy for rendering out the main ships (they're finished, so I might as well keep 'em). But everything else? The planet killer, the shuttlecraft, the destroyed planets, and everything beyond this project? Blender.
), and getting all the software back onto it is proving highly troublesome indeed. I've learned a bit of Blender and like it, but I've been using 3DS Max for years and it is hard to change - even though my hobby projects are probably better off in Blender. I'm sure you'll do great in Blender though: It does things a little unusually compared to other 3d apps but it is powerful and has a lot of features.
*runs* 
First, the phasers. Later, the a'splosions that they cause.
