lightwave hyper-real - check it out

[cocolas]

I know this isn't vray, but I thought it would be good inspiration for all of us - check these 3d planes out - done/rendered in lightwave:

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviatio...518780,00.html


paul.

[Dschaga]

yea ..i think lightwave have the most realistic colors of any renderer... hard to beat!

[cocolas]

yea ..i think lightwave have the most realistic colors of any renderer... hard to beat!

yeah....unfortunatly (since I use vray ) I have to agree with that.....
it's also been in development for years so it had time to mature beyond what's out there.....it's also quite fast as well......

although vray is getting there VERY fast...

[Dschaga]

hmm.. vray is faster... anyway there are some tweaks to speedup LW for the price of quality.

I think GI in lw is not the best, but they do something with the colors/contrast/ something ..i can't find out what.. the colors are like a sunny day in winter and you can breath the fresh air.

[cocolas]

hmm.. vray is faster... anyway there are some tweaks to speedup LW for the price of quality.

I think GI in lw is not the best, but they do something with the colors/contrast/ something ..i can't find out what.. the colors are like a sunny day in winter and you can breath the fresh air.

yeah, you're right about their GI - it's kinda faked in so to speak, and not too efficient.

but yeah, I think the key is in their color/contrast exposure control....
I can't point out what it is exacly but it just looks "right"....know what I mean?

[Syclone1]

Yea I agree for the most part with you all, BUT the one with the lady walking toward the plane is bugging me cause shouldnt the shadows be more blueish rather than black/brown?

-dave

[cocolas]

Yea I agree for the most part with you all, BUT the one with the lady walking toward the plane is bugging me cause shouldnt the shadows be more blueish rather than black/brown?

-dave

hmmm......I'd say probably lighter - not so black , maybe a little blue.
quite honestly though...the quality of the model is so high that that's the last thing that bugs me......

my favourite is the fedex ship - the small one - look at the scretches on the metal and the used-up feeling _ just incredible......

[n6]

Are they supposed to be realistics pictures?

To me it looks like a scanline render....

[cocolas]

Are they supposed to be realistics pictures?

To me it looks like a scanline render....

i don't know about that......
i don't think you could get that with the scanline - by a long shot........
i think you could do it w/ vray though....

paul.

[jujubee]

Hey. Look for my bandsaw and scrollsaw models in this current issue of POPSCI! It's in there courtesy of Kenn Brown of http://www.mondolithic.com.

You can check out my stand-alone vray renderings at:

http://www.lunarstudio.com

-jujubee

[yog]

yeah, you're right about their GI - it's kinda faked in so to speak, and not too efficient.

but yeah, I think the key is in their color/contrast exposure control....
I can't point out what it is exacly but it just looks "right"....know what I mean?

The raytracer in in Lightwave is top notch, despite not being improved on for a number of years it's still one of the better ones out there. Although the AA is brute force only, which can be a pain at times.

On the GI side I would have to dissagree and agree with Cocolas. One of the troubles with Lightwave's GI is that it is too accurate, no optomisations at all, which makes it dog slow. What would take an hour to render in Lightwave with a single GI bounce, I can render in quater of an hour in Vray with 10 light bounces and have it look magnitudes better. You would have to be a serious masocist in Lightwave to go for more than one light bounce

There are two things that are really great about rendering GI in Lightwave though. The first is that rendered images are held internally in 16bit before you save them out or discard them. This means that with the internal tools of the native image view you can play around with the black and white points of the render before saving to 8bit, a bit like how MAX 6 handles the import of HDR images.
The other great thing is a 3rd party plug-in called G2 by http://www.worley.com/G2/g2_main.html#startit It is hard to explain just how extremely useful this plug-in is without using it, but basically it is a lighting and material tweeker that works with a real time preview. The preview is about 95% of the final render quality and it allows you to adjust things like how much influence HDR environmental images have on a surface compared to physical reflections and adjust how much intensity GI effects the final render, it also does SSS, multiple specularities, skin shading, edge shading and art modes. All of these can be either global or on a per material basis.

[cocolas]

thanks for shading some light on that yog. I was hoping a lightwave user would add to this.......
do you know what's up with their exposure control /color management ??...as mentioned abouve seems like lightwave does something with that where the colors look extremely natural, I don't know if it's a render/internally managed by lightwave thing or maybe just an artist/user thing.

paul

[yog]

Not being a programmer I couldn't give you any specifics (I wouldn't understand them myself ), but a few educated guesses are :
At it's heart LW has always been a raytracer (unlike MAX which was mainly just a scanline renderer that added raytracing abilities as and when), not only that but LW has relied on brute force techniqes for everything, the AA is multi-pass only for everythning (very accurate but dog slow), and the only light that can be shadow mapped is a spotlight, all other lights are raytraced. And although raytracing can bring a lot of quality to an image, I believe that some of the saturation/contrast effects are a product of internal algarisms.
LW's raytacing is actually quite fast when compaired to other raytracers, it just looks slow because it gets used for most things in a scene.

This also has an unexpected bonus effect. I have noticed that Lightwaver's are also quite adept at coming up with work arounds to get a scene to render faster, they have to be This includes the infamous spinning light trick.
This involves parenting one null object to another and then parenting a light to the second null with an offset, spin the second null on it's bank axis 720degs per frame which in turn spins the offsetted light. With motion blur this turns a single point or directional light into an area light and means a shadow mapped spotlight can use much lower map sizes to create smooth edged shaddows.

Another possible example could be texture map blurring, this always caught me out when starting to learn MAX. As you know the texture map blurring in MAX is set quite high by default and seems to be cumalative with distance. This isn't the case with LW, there is a texture map blur function that is on by default, but it is set very low and is not cumalative. The result in LW is much sharper textures for stills, but "crawlies" on animations. This can be fixed with a gradient texture set to fade out the texture map over distance from the camera.

I might be way off with this last bit, but it might also be a reason.
It's possible that as a whole the the Lightwave community is more used to working with and matching live action footage. Traditionally Lightwave's main use has been in television (predomenatly in the US) with some small film work, whereas MAX has mainly been games orientated with some TV work. I think most of us that follow industry trends have seen major eroding of these traditional boundaries in the last 3-4 years (except possibly Softimage), but still the individual user bases as a whole retains more experience in one field than another.
As of MAX-4 with Vray I have seen no reason why MAX doesn't compete more with LW in render quality. Perhaps it's just historical prejudice as I honestly believe that MAX3 and below just couldn't compete in the photoreal rendering stakes, but that doesn't hold true now. Perhaps another 3-4 years will see no prejudices when it comes to games, tv and film work ?

My sinceriest dream is that LW will at last allow 3rd party renderers and the Chaos Group bring out a version of Vray for Lightwave, because I still hate modelling in MAX

[3dform]

so Lightwav again...

Well, I have started with Lightwave 9 years ago, but went to Max after 3 years. The reason was speed. You can do everything faster in Max and you have more tools that allow you to go back or modifie. One of worsed things in LW is that modelling and rendering is divided. If you need a box here or there, you have to import it and that made me gracy. It took however a half year to learn modelling in Max 2. Well now in Max 5 it's much easier.

LW has some nice Render effects and gagets. I would like to have this in Max too. Skytracer ( like dreamscpape) or Hypervoxel do stunning effects. I hope Phonix 2 will be a little bit like the Hypervoxel but with speed!

The pictures don't look stunning. They are very good, but have seen many similary stuff, done by different applications. Just think what hollywood produce with renderman (a scanliner).

I think no Max-User will survive more then 5 days with Lightwave, it's simple to old style...

regards,

robert

[jujubee]

I had to go out and buy this issue. Some of my models were featured in a spread on page 20-21 in collaboration with Kenn Brown. Check it out if you get a chance.

On a different note, the planes in this issue are pretty scary (although very realistic.) I don't know if I'd want to fly around in something that banged up. The have an awful lot of dents and exhaust darkening near the engines. You'd think they would be a little more environmentally friendly in the year 2033.

-juju