I just received the demo of Lightwave 7.5 yesterday and will be buying Lightwave 9 when I get a job and the money (as I just got reject from a job I just applied for). Yesterday I didn't get to play with the bugger, other than to play with the interface and work out what does what, today, I came up with a render, with my crappy PC and lack of ram, I got a very slow render time on this, but this is my first render in Lightwave, I will be updating this thread with newer stuff.
Its not an impressive render as far as thinks go, but I need to get the hang of things, but this is almost an overview of general tool usage, modeller, materials, procedural textures, rendering.
First impressions:
Looking at the demo of version 7.5, which originally release in 2002, meaning I have high expectations of Lightwave 9, Lightwave is famous for its renderer and I can see why, settings have been useful and creating powerful effects, including up to date techniques (up to date for 2002) The material editor felt very much like the one in Cinema 4D, which is good as it is simple and comes with its own set of procedural textures to use, as I did for the bump mapping above, the editor seemed very quick to work around and performance was really good, things came up quick, even the editor loading time was very short, also the editor doesn't seem to like draining up memory either, which is a good thing on this system. The modelling, I found to be different to what I am used to, but very easy to adapt to in my opinion, there are a lot of shortcut key, but everything in the editor is conveniently put with the shortcut key attached so you can pick things up in that area quickly. One odd thing I found was that the Modeller and Editor are two separate programs, which doesn't seem to be an inconvenience, as I tend to model, materialise, compose then render, which is very much what you can do here, even if a model is a WIP you still can save and reopen in the editor with no problem to see what it looks like rendered.
It certainly shows elements of Modo , Softimage|XSI and Cinema 4D
