Jump To: Animation Drafting Pragmatic-Features 3D-Summary

Simply put, f¥z has animation on a very premature infant level. It only allows you to render movement around object(s), and does not let objects interact with each other, such as opening doors, or moving boxes. It is all on a still life or frozen basis. It also has a Quicktime VR rendering capability, which is very slow and often not very impressive to most.

LW is after all, an animation powerhouse with IK (inverse Kinematics) or "Bones" as we like to refer to them, motion effects, PLUG INs, Particle animation, Motion Paths, and many more grand features a professional animator would need. Setting up basic movement in LW is as simple as creating a key frame at your starting point, moving an object, and creating another key frame. LW automatically smoothes out the transitions between your keyframes to produce a fluid motion path which is always editable.

Five frames of a222 frame animation

Click Image to Enlarge

Plug-Ins are yet another feature that exists in LW and not in form•z. These open architecture additions can be much like that of plug-ins in Photoshop, that allow you to render images in pointalized, crystallized, solarized, and many other stylized effects such as Cell Shading which imitates the Japanese Animation technique of painting continuous color & high contrast shadows between bold outlines. This lack of open architecture to support plug-ins in form•z has been a bone of contentions with many users for some time now. LW is one of the only 3D programs for the Mac platform, that has numerous freeware, shareware, and commercial plug-ins available due to its wide spread popularity among SGI, Sun, and Intel users. Many developers have already developed versions for LW on PowerMac and view it as a financial opportunely to help support Newtek's commitment to be the ultimate multi-platform 3D engine. Plug-Ins are also used to aid in creating geometry, such as fur & hair, and for centering, exporting, and deforming LightWave Objects. Some are modules that are put into LW's support folders and others are stand alone applications.

form•z has no NURBS or Plug-Ins, but it does have the ability to import your 3D models into drafting mode & apply accurate dimensions to them for construction documents & Presentations. As mentioned earlier, form•z handles scale very well and it is especially apparent when you produce documents at numerous scales, such as: 1/4"=1' to 3"+1' or 1mm = 1m to 1cm = 1m. You can easily tell form•z what size paper you are printing on and preview how it will look at any given scale; metric or American. It will even "tile" a drawing on multiple sheets with the overlap amount of your choice to produce large presentations from a small printer.

The ability to choose Pantone Calibrated colors or any other Mac standard color type is now available in LW 5.6 and always has been in form•z. form•z allows you to save individual preferences for pallet layout, UNDOs, warnings, and tools which is great for setting up proportional formats for different monitor bit depths like 640x480 and 1600x1024 and paper size outputs like 8.5"x14" and 11"x17" or Asian/European A4 and A3 sizes. form•z also has the ability to reconfigure your X, Y, & Z axis planes to build objects perpendicularly at specific angles or relative to other objects. Lets just say you need to build a spike shaped cone on the curved body of a Hedgehog. All you need to do is adjust the X Y Z plane to match 3 points on one of the polygons in the Hedgehog's body and extrude your cone.

LW has outlines & safe areas which can show you the limitations of the camera view proportion such as the difference between the Rectangular 16:9 aspect ratio Widescreen image you are rendering, compared to your 1024x768 pixel Square-like screen. This helps you to manage objects that need to be hidden out of the cone of vision for the first few keyframes and need to be moved to appear in the next few. LW also supports LightWave Script, which can be written by anyone with the proper training, to automate object placement or surface preparation for layout and many other calculation based processes. Most of these scripts are free and downloadable by their creators. I already mentioned SEGMENT MEMORY. Another unique feature LW has is the ability to change the Curve & Patch Divisions which govern how smooth an object is by its polygon density and segments in a curve. By setting the Curve & Patch Divisions low, you can make complex models that render fast on the screen, which can later be set to higher divisions for export & alignment in Layout. Lastly, the preference files for LW are actually SimpleText Documents which you can edit to fit your plug-in and directory needs for multiple configurations. Very sophisticated.

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