Changes in LightWave 2020, and What it Means for Octane

[jonjambon]

As someone who uses Octane instead of LightWave's native renderer, the many rendering and surfacing additions in the newly released LightWave 2020 upgrade are seemingly unusable... Which makes the decision of upgrading or not a hard one for me.

But there is a section in the LightWave 2020 manual called "Engineering updates", which details a number of changes under the hood to allow for better communication between LightWave and third-party plugins... It would be nice to have a clearer understanding as to how this may, or may not, improve interoperability between Octane and LightWave. (For example, will Octane now be able to access certain attributes from FiberFX that were previously unavailable?)... What I'm wondering is, how much does LightWave 2020 allow for improvement of the OctaneRender plugin? And will these potential advancements be utilized in the near future?

[juanjgon]

I'm fairly sure that some of these new LightWave core features are going to help in the future Octane plugin development, and there are more new features not listed there, like the API to support viewport rendering from external engines, etc.

Supporting the LightWave development updating your licenses to LightWave 2020 is important if you want to have LightWave alive and ready to continue working with Octane for LightWave. Even if you don't see any new feature that could improve your workflow, there is a ton of bug fixes, performance improvements, and as you say, new core features, that help in the future development and support of the Octane plugin.

Thanks,
-Juanjo