Tip: A handy plugin to speed things up in LightWave 3D - worth a look !

[OlaHaldor]

I just wanna give you guys out there a tip about an incredible handy plugin. The plugin is named

LWCAD

and is available for purchase directly from the website. Might be a steep license fee, but boy do you get your hands on some REALLY nice tools.

LWCAD is mainly tools for architecture and provides CAD-like possibilities into LightWave 3D. After reading some things about "you should not use booleans in Blender" for instance, I just had to show you how powerful this plugin is. Booleans in realtime. I don't know Blender at all, so I guess you probably got them there too.

You should check out the entire manual, and the training provided on the site.

After I bought LWCAD, I can't do modeling without LWCAD. The snapping tools alone are worth a nice amount of $$$ in my opinion. And then there's the smart and intuitive way of creating details like for wall details, the foot of a nice, exclusive pillar etc. The Engraver tools and the Profiler tools.

I simply can't live without them, and I hope you understand, and take these tools into consideration for your future purchase of both 3D application and plugin.

The greater the numbers of LW-users there are, the better can we get at helping each other with scenery/aircraft development with these given tools.

If you want more examples or got specific questions on how to use it, like creating a hangar with open doors or something, please ask me, and I'll make something for you to watch and see how I'd go about doing it.

[dan]

It looks like it's really really intuitive to work with, very natural and straightforward. To bad though there's not a plugin that will export finished models directly to X-Plane's object format. The hefty price tag isn't really helping it either for us freeware authors and most payware authors, but boy would it speed things up for my particular work flow! :'(

[OlaHaldor]

I see some of them freeware/payware guys use 3D Max or Maya for scenery/aircraft development - LightWave + LWCAD falls to only a tenth (or so) of the price vs. the two others mentioned. 

[Goran_M]

OH MY GOD!!!!!

Guess who's exporting a Hawker 4000 to Lightwave?

[OlaHaldor]

Hehe, I read on the LightWave forums that the modeling and animation for that short sequence took him 6 months to do.. Good luck  ;D

[Goran_M]

A Hawker 4000 transformer?  Nah.

But just the animations and rendering look phenomenal.

[OlaHaldor]

I sure wouldn't mind getting my hands on a Hawker 4000 to rig and animate, so ailerons, rudder and elevators are automatically adjusted so all I have to do is make a path for the object as a whole, and the rest is up to the scripts. I did this with an Airbus 320 once. Hard, but eventually I got it working. And then I added a null to animate the flaps as needed.