Lightwave 2018 Release Announced

[ccclarke]

After a deafeningly quiet period of two years, Newtek has finally announced Lightwave 2018 will be available for $295 (upgrade price) starting 1 January.

More official info here: https://www.lightwave3d.com/

CCC

[Oldcode]

Where does it say 295 for the upgrade? I only see that in the $295 (USD) 5-Seat Lab Pack Upgrade

It still says 495 for the regular upgrade.

[David cgc]

It's mentioned in the press release.

It looks like it goes on sale New Year's Day, with no pre-order option.

[Oldcode]

Thanks! I had not seen that page. I looked for something like that, but obviously missed it.

[Lemon Wolf]

I just tested the trial version for a bit and i have no idea what to make of this new version of lightwave.
Old scenes do load fine..mostly...but the surfacing and lighting is so different.....everything looks like crap now. Its like learning the program from scratch.
I cant find the dome lights anymore, no gmil, no reflection blurring option, no reconstruction filter option. Glow is now an image filter....tons of different things seem to affect render times now. An image that needed 6m30sec on LW 2015 is now at 63% and 22m.
I am really confused

[Meurig]

(Very late to the party, but...) ...Lightwave has just switched to a physically plausible renderer. That's a big change in the way the fundamentals of the lighting and shading systems work, I'm not at all surprised that your scenes look different.

Basically all the cheaty unrealistic hacks people have gotten used to over the years to attempt to make something look believable like specularity vs reflection, dome lights, reflection blurring etc are not appropriate any more. Now lights and shaders will (or should) behave as real lights & surfaces do instead. It's a good change, people will get used to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physic...ased_rendering

[Rigel]

I played around with the 2018 trial. It crashed a couple of times while trying to load one of my v10.1 scenes. The ones that loaded, the biggest flaw I saw was the specularity; it was HOT and BRIGHT! When I loaded my Raven's Claw model setup scene, I took 2 minutes to dial down the spec settings (from 20% to 5%) and ended up with a nice metal look. I didn't compare it to renders out of v10.1, but after that quick adjustment, it looked fine.

I have not played around in Modeller yet.

[Jedi2016]

I'm curious to hear user opinions on the full version. I keep seeing talk of bugs, but no specifics, aside from people not knowing where some of the new features are.

[mattc]

Originally Posted by Lemon Wolf

I just tested the trial version for a bit and i have no idea what to make of this new version of lightwave.
Old scenes do load fine..mostly...but the surfacing and lighting is so different.....everything looks like crap now. Its like learning the program from scratch.
I cant find the dome lights anymore, no gmil, no reflection blurring option, no reconstruction filter option. Glow is now an image filter....tons of different things seem to affect render times now. An image that needed 6m30sec on LW 2015 is now at 63% and 22m.
I am really confused

Well, now that everything works properly in a physically consistent manner it's time to unlearn. There';s ALOT of significant changes for the better.



All the docs are online.


https://docs.lightwave3d.com/display/LW2018/Standard



Will give you some tips and explanations as to why things 'look crap'.



Gmil was a shader, so it's gone. The old shading pipeline has finally been deprecated. So all the old 'shaders' are gone. The old 'Use Nodes' switch in the Surface Editor was really to override the old shading pipeline. i.e. hack. Surfacing is now all nodes.



Reconstruction filters are still there. They are now set on a per buffer basis in the render properties panel. Render Properties > Buffers > select buffer and you'll see the reconstruction filter options.







One thing to note is that objects created in LW2018.1 will be LWO3 format (which won't work in 2015.3 currently).



I've been running it for a day and it's been pretty stable so far.


M.

[GrahamTG]

Originally Posted by Jedi2016

I'm curious to hear user opinions on the full version. I keep seeing talk of bugs, but no specifics, aside from people not knowing where some of the new features are.

I've the full version, upgrading from LW11 so it's a big leap.
So far it's been very stable on my aging machine. I haven't noticed any bugs yet but to be honest I haven't even scratched the surface yet.
.
Scenes imported from LW11 do work with surface and lighting tweaking but render slowly if using the Standard material. Converting to the new materials does improve render times.

As MattC says you have to unlearn a lot.

[David cgc]

Originally Posted by mattc

One thing to note is that objects created in LW2018.1 will be LWO3 format (which won't work in 2015.3 currently).

There's a plug-in for older version that'll allow them to open .lwo3 objects. No idea how it'll come out, but it should be handy if you need to be inter-operable and forget to export in lwo2 on the 2018 side.

[mattc]

Originally Posted by David cgc

There's a plug-in for older version that'll allow them to open .lwo3 objects. No idea how it'll come out, but it should be handy if you need to be inter-operable and forget to export in lwo2 on the 2018 side.

Yup. I thought that hadn't made it into the wild yet.



I've been having fun with the PBR material. It's so easy to setup ONCE you read the description of the parameters.

[Gordon Robb]

Originally Posted by Rigel

I played around with the 2018 trial. It crashed a couple of times while trying to load one of my v10.1 scenes. The ones that loaded, the biggest flaw I saw was the specularity; it was HOT and BRIGHT! When I loaded my Raven's Claw model setup scene, I took 2 minutes to dial down the spec settings (from 20% to 5%) and ended up with a nice metal look. I didn't compare it to renders out of v10.1, but after that quick adjustment, it looked fine.

I have not played around in Modeller yet.

I haven’t looked at it yet. If it’s PBR now, you should try having your spec accurate, and adjust how it looks with reflection/roughness/smoothness (which ever it’s using).

[Lemon Wolf]

Thx MattC your post was very helpful.

Originally Posted by GrahamTG

Converting to the new materials does improve render times.

This might sound like a stupid question but i simply dont know. I looked at some models which loaded with the standard material options, is it even possible to combine texture maps with the new PBR system? I cant find any T symbol in the PBR tab just an envelope symbol.
Ok apparently through nodes ,i hate nodes

[3D_CG]

there is an update for 2018 already ??

[John Marchant]

So far so good, im impressed, just have to relearn how to surface and render in LW again. I like the fact uses real world values like Lux for lights now, long may this continue.

Both of these renders, whilst not great and just thrown together to test the surfacing only took 11 minutes.

I've not encountered any bugs but others seem to have, but hey not surprising.

Modeler seems yet again not to have got any real love, spline bridge is nice, a bit like magic bevel, lattice tool is good (and about time) but its limited.

Love the volumetric objects and i have tons of VDB's to put into that for hopefully some better clouds, nebulas and such.

For $295, its a steal just for the PBR, surfacing and rendering changes

[Starbase1]

Volumetric objects?

Tell me more, tell me more!

Originally Posted by John Marchant

So far so good, im impressed, just have to relearn how to surface and render in LW again. I like the fact uses real world values like Lux for lights now, long may this continue.

Both of these renders, whilst not great and just thrown together to test the surfacing only took 11 minutes.

I've not encountered any bugs but others seem to have, but hey not surprising.

Modeler seems yet again not to have got any real love, spline bridge is nice, a bit like magic bevel, lattice tool is good (and about time) but its limited.

Love the volumetric objects and i have tons of VDB's to put into that for hopefully some better clouds, nebulas and such.

For $295, its a steal just for the PBR, surfacing and rendering changes

[John Marchant]

Have a look at this, we can also load in VDB's from Turbulance and Blender.

https://docs.lightwave3d.com/display...e+-+Volumetric

[mattc]

First patch release:



List of fixes:


http://static.lightwave3d.com/downlo...g_20180112.txt


It's sitting in your accounts.

[mattc]

Second patch release.

Quite a number of fixes. Over 200.

http://static.lightwave3d.com/downlo...g_20180301.txt

[Oldcode]

Found a problem with the MakePath tool in Softfx. Everytime I click that button, Lightwave crashes immediately. Never had that happen in 2015.

[doctor49152]

Sigh. I've been waiting (and waiting) for the Octane build that works with 2018. So I've not really had a chance to use it since I purchased it (the day it was released).

Did I mention I've been waiting??

.. and waiting

[Gordon Robb]

.. and waiting ...

[mattc]

"We are all working really hard to have the new Octane and plugins builds ready as soon as possible. And "soon" means in this case that the new release should be a matter of few days, but I don't have an exact date yet.

Thanks for your patience,
-Juanjo"


Juan put this up on Friday.

[Gordon Robb]

The 3.08 RC is out, so I think it will be a matter of days now.