LightWave 2018 is coming ;) Tweet

[juanjgon]

There are a lot of changes in the LW2018 SDK, all good, and some of them really useful for the external renderers plugins. In any case, as I have said several times, there are no showstoppers in the current SDK, some things are not easy to do, but near everything is possible.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[ristoraven]

Thanks Juanjo. That is sufficient answer to me. I can now close up my future plans as a solid premise.

I'll stick with LW for as long as I make "traditional" cgi / VFX prior to making a permanent shift to Unity3D or UE4. At that point I'll go with Houdini 3D.

That's about a five year plan ahead.

[FrankPooleFloating]

That is great news J! Just what I wanted to hear! Thanks so much pal!

[Rob49152]

Since I've been using Octane almost exclusively since in became available for LW I've only enver used octane surfacing nodes and I love it. Activating VPR is now an accident when it happens.

With LW 2018 surfacing being PBR now I am starting to get confused about which render engine I should be thinking about. I love octane and the speed it offers but I've always found getting PBR materials into it finicky and require tweaking.

I'm still going to upgrade to LW 2018 when it comes out. I'm just getting muddied separation of the benefits of each engine now.

[ristoraven]

Since I've been using Octane almost exclusively since in became available for LW I've only enver used octane surfacing nodes and I love it. Activating VPR is now an accident when it happens.

With LW 2018 surfacing being PBR now I am starting to get confused about which render engine I should be thinking about. I love octane and the speed it offers but I've always found getting PBR materials into it finicky and require tweaking.

I'm still going to upgrade to LW 2018 when it comes out. I'm just getting muddied separation of the benefits of each engine now.

I read from LW forums that the new render engine lacks render passes.. That sort of clarifies this issue to me, since Octane class render passes are something I can't live without anymore. I am curious though how I could, if at all, mix these render engines somehow in a project and will there be any benefits in doing so..

Layout performance improvement is the most important feature to me. That alone is worth 295$ in my opinion.

[gamedesign]

Will the new SDK open up the possibility of using weight maps?

[3dworks]

happy new year to everyone! now that LW 2018 is out (and installed on my mac) - are older releases working with it or do we need to wait for a dedicated build?

cheers markus

[juanjgon]

Hi! Happy New Year!

Yes, LightWave 2018 needs a proper plugin build. There are a lot of changes in the plugin code to work in 2018, but all the work is done. The new plugin for LW2018 will be available in few days, once the new Octane 3.08 core is released.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[3dworks]

great!! looking forward and curious if handling speed with LW 2018 (especially data transfer to plugin) will be improved?

[juanjgon]

I've seen scenes that are extracted faster in 2018, and in any case, the extraction time is not slower for sure

Thanks,
-Juanjo