[Burtrenster]

Whats the difference between lightwave and maya and 3ds?

I have lightwave now and possibly may be getting another 3d program, Should I? ivre been told mayas rendering and animation is awsim and it works well with lightwave?

if you could give me a clear list a pros and cons between the two it would be a life saver. Thanks in advance.

[Fallenswordsman]

I'm not exactly going to give you what you want here, but I will give you some words of advice. First of all, try Maya out and see what you can do with it. There's a Personal Learning Edition available at their website. I don't know if its the same for 3D studio but you might want to see if you can get hold of a demo version of that as well. Then play with the demos as much as you can getting a feel for the programs and seeing which you like best.
Personally I don't think its a matter of better or worse, its more of a choice of what works with you best. For me, its like any art, people will swear by the types of paints they use or the types of paintbrushes they might use but at the end of the day, its the artist and the talent of the artist that makes the real difference. A talented lightwaver can create a lot better art than someone with a mediocre amount of talent with Maya, for example. Obviously we all want the best tools for the job, but don't just go swapping from one to the other just because you've heard one does things better. It may well be that it'll take you a number of years before you can use the enhancements that other packages may have over Lightwave anyway. I'm sorry I can't offer more than that; I have tried 3D Studio and Maya, didn't get on well with them so that's why i still stick with LW.

[chrispo]

Nice words, makes me want to buy another copy of lightwave to stroke.

[H.I.O.M]

@ Fallenswordsman:
Yea I've tried Maya and 3dsmax to but it haven't worked to good for me eather...but I will learn 3dsmax in school, starting in august. So I'm looking forward to that...

@ Burtrenster:
I think you should start whith Lightwave and learn the basics of 3d and textures, and when you've learnd some basics you could possibly change to Maya or 3dsmax...

good luck with it

[DigiMatt]

why in heavens name would he want to change to maya or 3dsmax after learning LW??
after all, it mostly comes down the to artist, not the tools he uses.

[kumar]

Hehe,, he maybe wants to change to get hold of the fringe benifits and a little more boost in the horsepower,,,, with Maya

[sod]

Have heard that Lightwave has the most horroble antialiasing of all render programs. Where others need one way through to get good AA, Lightwave is even worse with 37!

Do I'm telling bull**** or is that right? :p

[H.I.O.M]

Yo DigiMatt many tools have the same names in all three programs, and I think if you learn the basics first in one of them, it would be better than if you start from 0 in all of them at once...and I didn't meen he should stop with Lightwave and just change program. I was thinking about using lightwave and maya/3dsmax...

[philip]

I second the opininion that it all boils down to personal pereference. And what exactly you want to do with it.

If you want to break into feature film animation then for the love of god don't get Truespace
LightWave 8's new animation tools might change the weight a bit, but before I would have said try Maya and XSI (though XSI's price tag still is kind of hefty).
Now with a renderer like FPrime just around the corner LightWave might be the best buy for someone freelancing and doing mostly stills or ArchViz. Also, LightWave still is heavily used for TV shows like Enterprise, Firefly, Smallvile etc, notice that these are also examples of movie-level VFX.
LightWave comes with unlimited render node licences, so you don't have to buy a seat for every machine...
Then for me LightWave still has the best (poly-) modeler in the world. It's intuitive and fast. Simple things like the drag tool or bandsaw make your life so much easier.

For architectural stuff I had a demo of 3D studio Viz... just plain forget it! I honestly achieved better results when modeling in LW and rendering in LightScape. It's just sad this old proggie never got updated after v. 3.

I also have a seat of Maya and there's been a couple gigs I wouldn't have wanted to do in LW... also I'm dipping deeper into character setup and MEL scripting ATM and the possibilities just blow me away! Really. I scripted a character control window loaded with sliders for every control and an image of the character that'll let you select all the controls in 3 days, with absolutely no knowledge of MEL before that.
Since Maya is basically written in MEL, there's nothing you can't do with it. Then you now have access to one of the best renderers: mentalRay.

What Sod heard about the AA is kind of true. LW uses brutal force; "still not smooth? Well more iterations then." Whereas in Maya and mentalRay you have the choice between triangle, box, gauss, mitchell and lancosz, filter size X, filter size Y, min samples, max samples, contrast threshold for red, green, blue and alpha!
That'll really let you finetune your scene. Plus you can override these global settings and set the AA on a per-Object basis.

As for max, I can't really say... I don't like the UI But if you want access to the most 3rd renderers, max might just be for you...

[kumar]

Hehe,,, the tutorial crash dummy,,, is back.... Hehe hi there phillip...!

[PolarBear53]

What do you think newtek would have to change in lightwave to have it be a real competitor to maya and the others?

[Mark]

Hmm... The version number. 8 sounds like a good one...

[philip]

it already is. Every app has its pro's and con's.
And the more programs you're fluent in, the better you will sell.

[promethius]

I agree with the UI for 3DMax. If you really want to get into Modeling, LW is definitely the best App to start with. I myself, is looking into MAYA for Char Anima. With LW7 and up, they have improved the animation section 10 folds. Looking forward to the few tweeks in LW8.

Choices is what make things great in creative juices.

[jsprogg]

this thread has me really confused...I have all three apps and find LW to be the hardest and most awkward of them to use.
It is personal taste though and in the end if you can create what you want ,it doesn't matter what app you use.