[Voidmonster]

Newtek has promised severe beatings with weighted lawyers to those who disclose. Alas.

[CJElven]

Oooo...weighted lawyers? That's even worse than regular ones. Alright, I was curious about it myself...but I don't want to see anyone die.

[RonB]

Yeah, or a poke in that big eyeball of yours with a sharp wallet...next time don't mention you are betatesting something...whad ya expect, we hadda try ya know.

[bbuxton]

http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/lw9_demos.php

[Voidmonster]

Well, I either tell ya I'm rendering from 9, or I say nothing and then you say 'well, what version of LW are you working with' and then I say 'LW9beta' and then you ask me. I was just being efficient!

And I definitely cannot tell you about the re-biased Oren-Nayar Markovian pixel dispersion...

Mostly I can't tell you about that because I just made it up.

[CJElven]

If you could post a side-by-side, LW 9 vs. Maxwell...that could be interesting. 9 is supposed to be even better on the rendering front than 8.5 is, and I've seen some REALLY nice stuff with 8.5. Of coruse, that's if you're allowed to post any of the images...

[RonB]

Back to the topic...

Now, just to qualify myself and where I am coming from, I have been using 3D programs and other software for quit awhile, almost 14 years. I was a tech editor on a Photoshop 6 book and taught professional level classes for 5 years. Among my students were imployees of ILM, Phil Tippet Studio and instructors from the SF Academy of Art. I am not exactly a dummy when it comes to running programs. That being said, I have made concentrated efforts at this the last few days and I am still very frustrated. Following the suggestions of Herve and Zak helped to some degree. But Herve's work around really doesn't cut it. I also found half the time the material settings are not saved with the files either in LW or in the MXM saves. I bring the object into Studio and have to reasign many of the materials again. I find the material editor baffling, I am unable to assign for instance SSS, and Studio is almost impossible to manipulate in. Sun settings don't seem to function, and for the most part neither does HDR.

I hate to sound like a whiner here but I find the manual to be very lacking. It is more of a declaration of Maxwell does, not how to do it. What I'm getting here is a feeling of 'go experiment figure it out yourself and if you do your one of the guys'. The same sort of thing I got years ago when starting out with Electric Image. NL needs to hire a decent manual writer not one of the tech guys who works on the programming.

I will keep plugging away here but at this point the software is useless to me for any serious work. Now I see all these great images being done, mainly through Max I would guess. I own Max 5 but apparenly Maxwell doesn't work with the earlier versions, I don't have the $ for the upgrade. Besides, I am much more comfortable in LW. I guess I'll just wait till things are better with later iterations...I just hope it doesn't take another year.
That's where I'm at right now.

[CJElven]

that's the way the manual has always been, though. It's a little more complete now, but it's more of a sales brochure than anything.

[RonB]

I have just spent 3 hours trying to setup and duplicate this simple studio shot that I did in native LW:

Each bottle is a seperate object as is each cap. There is the label for each bottle and a bump for each cap. There are three emitters in the scene and a simple backdrop. All objects are 3 point polys. Everytime I create a MXM and save it upon render it has changed to something else. The emitters all revert to a default diffuse and the bottles change to emitters. I finally got the labels to stick but the lids and bottoms still change to emitters and the actual emitters to diffuse. The texture files for the cap's bump are not recognised, I have tried .tga as well as .jpg's. This is really frustrating...I would like to know what the hell I'm doing or not doing but I cannot figure it out.

Ron

[victor]

Ron, send us the scene by private email and let's see what's going on with it. Add details about the bugs you've found.

[RonB]

Victor,

You will need all objects, textures etc..right? You want the MXM and MXS files too?

I've sent them...

Ron

[victor]

Lightwave files (.lwo, .lws) and .mxm materials.

Thanks,