I've been a LightWave user since the Amiga days, working with it in several companies first and getting my own license as a freelance around the LightWave 7 days. It has been my main tool as artist for at least 15 or 20 years, and also the platform for some of my first external renderer plugins like Arnold and Octane for LightWave, projects that probably have opened the doors of my current job as a full-time software developer. I only can say a big thank you to all the LightWave users that have supported the plugin development with your purchases or subscriptions, and it has been great to see how many amazing projects have been done with Octane and LW in the past years. Also thanks to Otoy for giving me the opportunity to work on this project.
Leaving the Octane for LightWave plugin development has not been an easy decision, but please, don't blame Otoy or Jules for it. They didn't force me to leave the plugin development at all, it was my personal choice. The lack of enough time on my side to work on this project is of course part of this decision, but probably the main factor to leave the project is related to the fact that the LightWave development is dead. There is nobody on the other side working on it, nobody to add, fix or improve the multiple problems and limitations that LightWave has on the SDK and core sides to support such a complex renderer plugin like Octane is now. LightWave as dead software also means that there are fewer users working with the plugin each day, so well, personally it is hard to find the right motivation to spend so much time trying to find workarounds for problems sometimes near impossible to fix, or to try to improve/refactor the incredibly convoluted code that the plugin has to work in so old architecture and with so many limitations.
Also, I want to say that the people who paid a new subscription in advance are not fully wasting money. It is true that the plugin is not going to get the 2021 Octane core in the short term, but like happens with LightWave itself, you can still work with Octane in your projects, probably for a long time, and you can use your license with other applications, from Blender or Unreal to C4D or Houdini. In this case, thinking about your money, there is even a small but important difference, LightWave is fully abandonware, while I'm still here to at least partially support the current Octane for LightWave plugin build in my spare time. That means that a critical issue can still be fixed, and a question can still get an answer from the plugin developer. Try that with Newtek & VizRT and we can talk about wasting money
Anyway, thanks all again. I really hope that you can still work with LightWave/Octane for a long time, or at least you can find a good replacement for LightWave and use Octane with some of the other amazing supported applications out there.
-Juanjo
