Review: form•z Renderzone & LightWave 3D

Newtek: LightWave 3D 5.6 & Autodessys: form•z 2.95
by: Phubear (Industrial Designer & Instructor of form•z and LightWave 3D 5.6)
Published: 4/17/2000

Overview:
This review is aimed at anyone who is interested in using either LightWave 3D 5.6 from Newtek Inc.. or form•z 2.95 from Autodessys on a Macintosh computer for Professional or High End-Consumer use. Keep in mind that this comparison is purely my personal opinion and is entirely relative to the fact that I use these programs for Industrial & Architectural Design purposes. Much of my input comes from past students which ranged anywhere from Product Design to Fine Artists to Architects, who have had both positive & negative reactions to form•z and LightWave 3D.

Interface of form• z 2.95 & LightWave 3D 5.6
QuickDraw 3D & OpenGL
Model Creation
NURBS (Non Rational B-Splines)
Layers & Objects
Textures
Rendering
Animation
examples: form•z 2.95 - LightWave 3D 5.6
Drafting
Pragmatic Working Process Features
3D Program Summary
Software Aids
Hardware Considerations
Intuos Tablet Review

form•z has long been the software of choice for Product, Environmental, Illustrative, & Architectural Designers due to the fact that it was originally for the Mac & fully supported Modeling, Rendering, & Drafting. Much of its critical acclaim is derived from its excellent ability to handle architectural scale and photo-realistic results for renderings of buildings, small consumer products, and industrial equipment with minimal effort. It's current default interface consists of window pallets for shaders (textures), Lights & Layers; numerous icons for tools; menus for views, and a basic set of 4 windows for Side, Top, Rear, & Perspective views. Much like that of Macromedia's Freehand, form•z is one of those powerful programs which is much more palatable with larger 19" or greater monitors which enables one to display most or many of the tools & pallets which are all identifiable by their icons or names. I highly recommend viewing only one large window & toggling between different views as redraw times become slow with more complex and detailed objects. form•z also has a nifty little application called Imager which allows you to send a set of renderings to be done unattended from any given number of models & views.

LightWave 3D 5.6 also has an extended history, but more so with the entertainment oriented designers than the Industrial or "physical" design field. Many of you are already familiar with its use for M&Ms commercials, Seaquest DSV, Babylon 5, StarTrek, & Xena. It was originally part of the famous Video Toaster Suite for the Amiga Platform computers. Thus it's interface is much more sparse in appearance, and may be considered "Un-Mac" like to some. This is especially true of versions 5.0 - 5.5. However, things have changed a great deal with version 5.6 and many of the Interface colors are now customizable. The LightWave Suite is actually a paired set of two separate applications; Modeler for creating Three Dimensional objects & basic Surface attributes and Layout for Animating or moving those objects & Surfaces. Modeler is comprised of a single application window which is scalable and divided into Tabs or Modes at the top left, Functions or Tools that correspond to the Tabs on the left panel, and 4 basic divisions of Side, Top, Rear, & Perspective views for the rest of the window. There are no "fancy" icons & everything is labeled with text. There is also a 3rd application included in the package known as Screamer Net which allows one to send sets of animations to a multitude of computers on a network & patch them all together to make one seamless animation file. This works without even having LightWave on all the computers! Very handy for those of you with multiple G3s & G4s linked via Ethernet hub.

QuickDraw 3D & Open GL
Both programs support QuickDraw3D & Open GL real time rendering while modeling so that one can see changes in an objects shape as it happens. User Beware that you might need to download a patch for LightWave 5.6 & only form•z 3.0 or greater to supports OpenGL.


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