Lightwave 6.0 = radiosity, caustics / Maya 2.5 = zilch

[meta-nerd]

Why is it that the supposed top 3D software (ie maya) is being surpassed by NewTek in many areas of 3d software development? Have any of you seen radiosity renders at the NewTek website? The quality of a lightwave render is ten times better than maya's and from what I've been told it is just as many times easier to set up. Can you imagine soft shadows without spending hours tweaking your depth map shadow att.'s? Can you imagine a completely seamless character that doesn't have you pulling your hair out trying put together? Hey Maya developers, check out lightwave 6.0 and take some notes. Give me radiosity/caustics and keep your paint fx (that I'll only use once a year). - a very frustrated animator

[mistah_a]

yes the new lightwave looks like a great relese;
i have not been a lightwave fan;But with this relese it starts to look interesting;)nice price too,
just look at the renders on the site(i

[actarus]

Yea lw's got a nice little renderer there,

Personally, I have never needed, nor wanted radiosity,
caustics would be nice, in special cases, like
light bouncing off water. But that can be faked perfectly
fine.

Look at renderman, it doesnt have these features(or does it?) and it's the most widely used renderer for highend
production.

A package isnt judged by it's renderer, remember that.

[taliesn4]

Alias/Wavefront had begun again to show some more aggressive moves in competitive side-grade pricing for 3DSMax licensed seats,but it's going to get even harder to justify the high cost of additional render licenses when a single copy of Lightwave is all you need for rendering on as many boxes as you can finesse and then surpassing Maya in quality & speed. LW6.0 also leads on the cross-platform front and is additionally committed to following up with a port to MacOSX
( which is UNIX-based ) when that highend-entrant OS is released. With LW6.0's rendering prowess tapped into MacOSX's multi-tasking & SMP clustering, then beauty will be alloyed with speed at very aggressive pricing.
Maya3.0 would do well to seriously reconsider the extra charging for each per-CPU render licensing when it ports
to MacOSX because the competition is really getting "that good". When MacOSX is released there will be no further reason for any new generation of up & coming serious CG Artists to learn IRIX. Linux will there for rendering as well,but is still geekware ( and proud of it) and nowhere near being anything artist-friendly. As much as LW6.0 has learned from following Maya's lead in feature sets, Maya could now learn from LW's path of ascent in regards to more competitive pricing and broadening its platform availability
thus allowing Maya to tap into an even wider customer-base; the potential MacOSX-base being the most readily available & attractive.

"Morbius.....creation by mere thought":
Forbidden Planet (1956)

"Morbius.....creation by mere thought":
Forbidden Planet (1956)

[pari]

Yes Tad, you are right. Renderman doesn't have radiosity or caustics but the difference is, all the people that use renderman learn it before using it. Funny how that makes the images look so good.

[exxray]

Since when did animators care about all that fancy antsy shading crud anyways .

Honestly... Radiosity is still too expensive on rendering time for any practical production use. Its quicker to "fake" it. I already witnessed a few debates between DD and FI about whatever or not L6 gives consistant radiosity results during animation. It would be fine for stills but it wouldn't be suitable for animation with inconsistant shading. If and when I decide to dust off my LW 5.6 and upgraded to 6 I'll see what all the hubhub is about but honestly.. radiosity and caustics isn't that big of a deal.. and if I recall BMRT supports it.. costs nothing and you can use it with maya with a bit of work. Why should alias re-invent the rendering wheel when other companys already have.

Seamless nurbs characters aren't a big issue.. its a matter of properly planning out your modelling network.

[meta-nerd]

I think you are missing my point. To a small post house 3D guy, these features are a big deal. I do not have TD's writing shaders for me. I model, animate, and texture everything I do. I cannot afford to buy or take the time to learn renderman. And believe me, I've been faking smurf a long time when it comes to rendering in Maya. Maya developers SHOULD reinvent their rendering wheel because if they don't, they may loose a substantial part of the 3D market. As for your modeling comment, I agree that proper planning could end in the same result with both programs, but from what I've seen, it is about ten times easier to do so in Lightwave.

[helder]

I totally agree. Certainly a program should not be reviewed exclusivelly based on its rendering capabilities, but we CAN'T deny that rendering is indeed a very important thing.

Since Alias|wavefront decided to compete even with 3DMax, they have to take this competition all the way. Everyone knows that Maya is the best 3D package available, but I really think that if they don't improve Maya's renderer as soon as possible, we might be some important steps behind Lightware or Max.

SOme of you guys may work on big houses, and afford RenderMan and the programmers it demands. But since A|w decided to lower Maya's price, it is necessary to regard smaller houses as well.

The lack of a good renderer might be the decision point for a house NOT to choose Maya.

It is really a petty. Let's wait for 3.0 and pray that the best modeling/animation package has the best renderer...

Best regards,

Helder Conde
ATITUDE Digital Communication
BRAZIL

[jtk77]

I think this will all be helped out when Mental Ray will be working with Maya (rumor , but its been said so much its probably true). Mental ray is affordable for the small places and you really don't have to hire a programmer to use it. Renderman isn't that expensive , but to get someone who can use it correctly is. Maya has a lot of other stuff far more important than its renderer to worry about. Maya is an ANIMATION package . It can do that and give you more control than any other around. I'd still like to see more improvements in that area, Sumatra( or whatever, xsi..)has a few niffty things I want to see stolen. If the render was faster and stayed at the current quality , I'd be happy . I'd also be happy if it had an option to render automatic shadow and reflection passes without jumping thru hoops . And layer rendering like a batch automation so I didn't have to baysit a scene with 20 layers and swich them on/off each time one finishes. Also , better mutli-threading. Plus , not too important, but a few aditions or work on the particles . They were the best and still are extremely good , but I've seen some special plugins for other programms that are pretty outstanding. Oh , and optimise the whole damn code , Mayas getting bigger with each installment faster than Windows. Soon you'll need a gig of ram to run it! ANyway , lightwaves cool , and by all means everyone should look into learning it . Its not that much of a big deal to me, it almost has to give you free render licenses to apologize for all the bugs.

"..you know, its hard to get people to pay you to make dancing robots.."
--Mr.K

"..you know, its hard to get people to pay you to make dancing robots.."
--Mr.K

[ft260]

Did you know 3d studio Max and lightscape have been able to do radiosity for several years?
The radiosity renderings look great, but it is not practical. It takes so long to caculate the light info. Even if the light info is done, it would needs to redo the caculation if you have geometries moved or animated.
What 3d max has done is to calculate the background (buildings) and composite the animated characters.
This is not something new.

I wonder how long it took for those Newtek's images rendered.

[fredc]

Modeling + Animation + Rendering = Finished Work.

If you don

[pari]

If you can't get the look you need out of Maya's renderer after learning it, you are INEPT, and should think of changing careers. I don't mean to be insulting but I have had little problem using the render and lighting isn't my strong point. I can see the problem if you have no sense of light but this "crapy" renderer thing has just got old. Some of comments I have heard in the past few months are ridiculous. I am begining to wounder how many people who comment on this issue actually use Maya at all and are just saying these things out of envy. Has this become an excuse for those whos first attempt at computer graphics ends tragically. If your image looks that bad, it could be possible that YOU are the weak link. There are just to many excellent Maya renderings out there for people to be so naive on this subject.

[helder]

Ok. Now that was not a good one.

Somebody who spent 16,000 on an Unlimited seat of Maya is not playing nor testing anything. We're professionals, and your comment seems a little rude.

The point is not that Maya's renderer is poor quality. The matter is: Compared to other packages, how good is Maya's renderer? And we're not only talking about image quality, here. In terms of quality, the renderer is pretty good. We're talking about rendering management and settings: shadows, multithreading, network rendering, field assembling, and so on.

So, I don't know anybody who has Maya who would drop it. It is the best package. Period. But it's part of our job, as professionals, to regard all its good and bad aspects, and as a user community, point them out to A|W to make Maya improve even more.

Don't take it personally, OK? We're all professionals here, who want to do better computer graphics, just like you, the Softimage, Lightwave or 3DMax guys.

I really think this discussion is worthwhile ... and might give as a better renderer in Maya 3.0...

Best regards,

Helder Conde
ATITUDE Digital Communication
BRAZIL

[pari]

My comment clearly not intended for those of who are speaking concern or informing others. It seems to me the majority of posts (not all) on this site are from educational users that are learning or who want to learn. When I first got into 3d, the opinions of others that were already in the field on applications, tips and areas of focus where of great value. I was very lucky to get honest and experenced advice. It is because of this I get very upset when some people fill these posts with outlandish lies that I am sure have led some prospective 3d artists in misguided directions. Comments about a software you don't own and have never used, written solely to justify your choices are incosiderate and detrimental. To say maya's renderer is not at the same level as menatal ray or renderman is true but to say it is "crap" is B.S. and as I stated before, says more about you then it does about Maya.

[jtk77]

I'm with you Pari , I'd say over 90% of maya "bugs" are user error. I told this to a max user who'd been using Maya for about 4 months when he was talking about how unstable and bug ridden Maya was. He got mad and quit talking to me until I went over and fixed about all of his"bugs". There are a big 10% that are Mayas fault so don't get me wronge on that, it seems if people spend as much as Maya costs they expect to be able to create the Matrix after going thru the tutorial book , then when its not comeing out how they want , they call yell "bug". I've been seriouslyt focusing on getting the kind of renders I see on Maya user sites and I must say , practice makes perfect. The maya render is slow , it does have issues . It certainly is not something that needs to take president over other things. Caustics would be VERY cool , Radiosity is last on my list . You can get a great image from the worst renderer ever if you can light it correctly. Oh and someone up to posted Modeling+Animation+render=Finish ....um , you forgot the VERY important POST. Tghis is another reason people can't get what they want right off the bat. Render in layers and passes , then post it all together , tweek what you need to tweek.

"..you know, its hard to get people to pay you to make dancing robots.."
--Mr.K

"..you know, its hard to get people to pay you to make dancing robots.."
--Mr.K

[benacler]

One of the things that's being overlooked here is that Lightwave's radiosity (while fast and pretty) takes a huge dump when it renders out animations. The radiosity calculation's all over the friggin place and your scene will "jitter" like a bastard. Supposedly they're looking into fixing this for the next intermittent release, but it's not the holy grail right now.
I like the quality of Maya's renderer, really, and radiosity and caustics are usually faked reasonably easily. I wouldn't mind HAVING these features, but I don't want them if they're like LW's.

Plissken

[brbedwel]

I spent $$$ on a B.F.A in 3D Animation where Maya was the program taught. 3DsMax and Lightwave were optional as electives. Do you know how this makes me feel when all I see are job posts for 3DsMax and Lightwave artists? I feel very upset.

[pari]

Most new jobs working on 3d for film and commercial are for Maya. More then lightwave and max combined in the surveys I have seen.

[fish]

Radiosity in Lightwave is great, but like you say, its not that big a deal and useless in animation. Maybe they are going to fix that but Lightwave [6] needs so much to be fixed that this might take some time.

I've been using Lightwave for quite some time and I'm trying to work with [6] now, but a lot of the new features that sound very good are useless becouse they are implemented very badly. Newtek states that they have UV mapping now, in the 6.0 version it was useless, with the 6b patch it got better but still not properly working with SubSurfaces. And I could name you lots of stuff like this.

What I'm trying to say here is that you should not believe all you see at demo's and fancy press realeases. Lightwave [6] is a great concept, if they just got it working properly.

About modeling in Nurbs, well did you ever try modeling a seamless hand ? And not just an hand, but one that looks as good as what's possibe with Sub Surfaces.