Warwick-hunt

Has anyone got any experience of this program? struggling with it at the minute
http://http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/
i wanted to just try something simple to start but can't get that far

Iain Young

I've been using it for years. The basics are really quite straightforward once you get the hang of it There's some good tutorials in the manual, so I'd use that as a starting place...

TopBanana

Didn't this start life on the Amiga or am I getting confused?

Warwick-hunt

iain, i've tried but my model doesn't seem to follow the one in the tuturials

i tried the flag tut, but the button for change part name isn't highlighted so i can't press it

downloaded the vids for making a basic head and there was no sound, most of the others start with something already created, the ones that start from scratch i can't follow after about 5 mins, i think mainly because some are for earlier versions and the buttons are in different places

rmtypeR

Yep, it was at version 5 onwards that it came out on the PC (and DEC Alpha). The Amigas they used to render Babylon 5 on had 50MHz 68030 processors and a huge 32MB RAM! Of course that was loads back then.

And if you were really rich you could pay about £5000 and get a DEC Alpha with an unbelivable 166MHz processor. The stuff dreams are made of.

Iain Young

Yes it did, along with the video toaster (which they also still make, although for the pc now).

Which version of lightwave are you using? I've not looked at the tutorials for ages, but the manual should match the product

lightning101

Turbosilver was the predecessor to lightwave on the amiga

NWMark

warwick, ive tried lightwave, 3d studio max and couldnt get a handle on either of. Got a shelf full of books heres for both, from lightwave 6, 7 and 7.5 and also 3dMax 4, 5 and 6

So as a last ditch attempt tried Maya and found it really easy to pick up, layout is just so easy to use, and the space bar menu so handy. and that is with no books, just followed a few online tutorials.

Because the packages are so big now the learning curve is going to be steep for any of them, i think its more down to personal preference more than anything else.

Mark

Warwick-hunt

i done a landscape before, looked cool but too much stuff to take in

gave up really, just downloaded autodesk 3ds max, seems ok so far, for what i want to do

just searched for maya, seen its an autodesk product as well, without downloading the trial to have a look, is it better than the 3ds max ?

NWMark

better... i couldnt say as i found 3dmax the worse out of the three to learn, i suppose someone how knows what they're doing would say it is fine though.

I just seemed to click with maya much much more easily than the other 2. After my first internet tutorial dabbles i also used the excellent digital tutors CD tutorial, ive done the first 3CD's and made a nice little animation of a star wars pod racer

no textures or lighting yet though.

Mark

Warwick-hunt

thats done it for me, just going to download the trial and have a look now,

where do you get the cd tutorials, are they on the site for download?

nice one, post some pics when your done

messiah

Maya is now owned by Autodesk?

Bet its gone downhill a lot then...

You can get a learning edition of Maya for nowt, although all your stuff will be watermarked.

Also - isn't Maya what most of the big SFX companies use? IIRC, ILM were part of the development process...

Iain Young

It depends on who you speak to. Most big SFX companies use a mixture of all the big programs, (use the best tool for each particular job). For example, I know Pixar / Disney etc mainly use Renderman, combined with a lot of in-house written software.

Others use Maya, and some other use Max / Lightwave. These tend to be used more for tv work than film, although I know lightwave has been use in several big buget movies recently, (all of Babylon 5 was done in lightwave a few years ago, and it was used for a load of stuff in Serenity last year).

Max, whilst used a lot in tv stuff (advirtisements mainly), is also a particular favourite for creating models for computer games.

Warwick-hunt

just trying the demo version of maya now and a box came up with this

"Your graphics card doesn't support hardware rendering. Pixel shading extensions insufficient.
mental ray for Maya 7.0 a restricted mental ray demo version. Disabled features:
- thread and host parallelism,
- loading and saving of shadow, photon, and final gather map files,
- hardware rendering,
- light mapping, and
- resolutions greater than 512 * 512 (even numbers only).
- A mental ray stamp is overlaid.
__________________________________________________ ___________________
mental ray: version 3.4.3.61, 26 May 2005

i've got a packard bell computer, i don't fance having to change the graphics card would i really need to, to use the program

Warwick-hunt

****** wouldn't work, just shuts down, shut it self down five times now???

Iain Young

Maya does need to pretty high spec pc to run properly...

Warwick-hunt

think mines ok

both maya and 3ds max wouldn't work, maya just says time out and crashes

i get this with 3ds max "DLL <C:Program Files\Autodesk\3dsMax8\stdplugs\mtl.dlt>failed to initialize.Error code:1455 - paging file is too small for this operation to complete."

anyone know what the problem may be
cheers

Iain Young

I'd guess you haven't got enough memory to run it...

D16GER

Basically it is running out of virtual memory because the paging file on your system is too small. You need to increase the paging file size.

To do this simply go to system properties>advanced>performance>settings>advanced> virtual memory>change

then either set it to system managed or just increase the max size.

Warwick-hunt

cheers di6ger, i wouldn't have had a clue how to do that, nice one

Iain Young

If setting it manually, it's generally recommended that you make the paging file twice the size of your system memory. So (for example) if you have 512Mb of ram, make the paging file 1gb. If you have 1gb ram, make the paging file 2gb.

Another handy tip is that if you have two hard drives in the machine, you can put the paging file on a different drive to the one you have windows installed on. This can increase the speed of boot up times etc...

messiah

IIRC Lightwave was used for Star Trek Voyager too - also the first Blade film.

Warwick-hunt

Thanks very much Iain

D16GER

The twice RAM equation is old hat now really. I need 4gb for my paging file. Anything less and the system struggles when doing large PS projects etc.

Iain Young

What size projects are you working on then? On my machine I can happily handle a dozen full size raw images at the same time in PS (and the RAW files from my 5D aren't exactly small).

Warwick-hunt

it was set at 195mb i set it to system managed, thanks again di6ger

Warwick-hunt

iain have you got any images or designs you've worked on that you could post, i'd really like to see some completed 3d stuff

(don't laugh) i was following the help tutorials and nearly made a 3d hammer before it crashed on me last time

D16GER

I never get any warnings from Windows, but I use Diskeeper for defragmenting and it used to bitch about the pagefile size, stating that I had used 98% of available memory when it was sitting at 3gb!! So, up to 4 and it has been fine since.

lightning101

WH I do 3D modelling as part of my job, mainly 3D studio, but am getting back into lightwave now that its 64 bit and flys when rendering.

Here is the sort of stuff (I am in the oil and gas business)

messiah

nice work - but I cant help thinking its a screen grab from bob the builder...