Wow fantastic detail!

Beautiful work, as usual ,Grendel.
Quite envious.

Like you, I am worried about Carrarra---just so comprehensive/easy to use.
I have LW9.5 and XSI 6.5(won in competitions)but they seem so very complex (long winded!) to learn.

Brian

excellent render as always, grendel... but perhaps you missed last week's "solenoid valve pack" sale? :)

jonah

I need a new computer. I'm red in the face.

Awesome!

Nice piece of engineering there Grendel, very interesting item.

Cheers

Thanks all.

BWTR - I have Lightwave as well(9.5) but have not even started down that road yet, Modo as well. I am really pleased with the mesh output from MOI, it looks great in all of the render progs.

Wow really cool object, so cool details :)

I don't want to hijack the thread, but as you are talking about lw 9.5, I have some questions :P

I'm starting a new job tomorrow, a ride movie, and I really hope I can use MoI for some content creation.
Looks like lw 9.5 can finally read vertex normal from .obj files, however I just send some testing object to a friend who's already working on the project,
and it's a mess ... the object looks ok in the opengl viewport, but not in the rendering, every normals from the vertex normal map are inverted :S

Do you have any tips to correct that in lightwave ? (the first solution is to flip the object normals and force the 2 side face rendering in the surface editor, but it's not very sexy, and will gives many troubles for transparent surface, self shadows, slow gi etc)

I suppose the only solution is actually to get some support from Newtek, but as there are not very responsive I'm afraid the project will be finished before a fix will be released.

Hi PaQ - maybe you can ask them if they plan to support reading vertex normals from LWO files as well.

MoI writes vertex normals to LWO as a 'NORM' texture chunk which is supported by Modo, hopefully LW will support the same thing.


But as far as your current problems go, it certainly sounds like a bug which will need to be fixed up by Newtek...

- Michael

Hello Michael,

The vertex normal works for .lwo as well ... somehow :P

At the first loading of the .lwo, the opengl show the model perfectly ... in the surface editor there is a new 'vertex normal' tab that show the vmap used, and it's active.
However hit F9 (render), nothing is smoothed, just flat shading

Deselect and reselect the normal map in the surface editor ... now it's rendering correctly, except of course that the normal map is inverted (.obj behavior)


Really wondering if these guys test their software ... I'm already nervous grrrrrrrrr

I'll ask tomorrow, with the guy who's managing the licenses at my new job, if they can have some support for that problem.
But as they are already in production with lw 9.3, they are not very hot to switch to 9.5 just for me anyway :'(

The LW9.5 update is a free one. Should not create any problem for your work to update I would think.

Brian

It's not that Paq would have the problem, it's the rest of his team that has 9.3 set in their pipeline.

My son is the "guru"? in a big government organisation (land mapping type stuff), he works from about 10am to 6.30pm and does updates to machines from about 4.30 pm when the rest start to go home.

Would you believe, they have JUST updated all the systems to Windows XP!

(He builds the most fancy equipment here at home (I get the hand me downs) on which he spends almost all his free time keeping ahead of the computer game to help at his work place--not paid time, naturally!)
It's a new world!
Brian

Great job Grendel!
This is Total Pro Work and very impressive!
What was your reasoning in going with C4D for your renders then all the others?
Some of my favorite galleries were done with C4D and Modo.
I love the look. C4D R11 was just announced btw.

Thanks Jiro ;)

I have used Carrara for quite along time and it outputs a good still image and is a very inexpensive package. I have also used C4D for a long time to a lesser extent due to it's cost structure. I usually skip a version between upgrading. I had v6, 8, and now 10. I like what I see in v.11 and now that I am actually making some profit from this (it's my little job on the side) I may get to upgrade.

As to the other packages I have (Modo and Lightwave) I have just not put in the time required to get too a level I am comfortable with yet. I purchased them either through competetive upgrade pricing or sales when I had some extra cash.

I have XSI 5.5 and liked the render engine but did not like the nodal shader system. I could work with it but it just took longer to get the materials I wanted. I would like to get XSI7 but now without foundation I think it's too high a price for my needs.

Sweet! Right now, i am rendering in either Blender or Vue.
I wish to go with either Modo, C4D, or Lightwave. I want the most photorealistic images
especially with futuristic robots (stormtrooper-like), spaceships, and
abstracts. I don't care for the cost structure of C4D or XSI either.
Still not sure of the 3 above though but i am leaning towards Modo for Polymodeling and maybe
bypass Silo.

Lightwave is rather inexpensive in comparison to the others as well as Modo. Modo is not really a complete package yet though but it does some things that Lightwave does not, more modern poly modeling and painting displacement and color.

I would reccomend whatever you are most comfortable with, make sure you try all of the evaluation versions before you spend you're money. Most of these different render engines can achieve a good render just through different ways. I often take the same object and bring it into different packages try to get a good render out of each of them for practice.

I agree, definitely try out any demos of a package you may be interested in - also once again, great work, Grendel!

For me, XSI imports MOI's objects (when selecting the 'User Normals' option) just as well as Cinema 4D does so that's another good choice (though just as pricey!)

Lightwave would be great considering its price if they'd just get their act together with their imports and exports.

I haven't tested LW's latest version yet cause frankly, I've taken a wait and see stance on how v9.5 finalizes.

-Will

Will
LW9.5 is now the final free update version. (No longer a Beta)

Have not been excited enough to reload LW to my computer yet though.

Brian