LightWave 3D
Yesterday my brand-new copy of LightWave 3D showed up! That was pretty neat. It was fun looking through the material that came with it, and recognizing scenes from Battlestar Galactica and a whole bunch of other TV shows and movies. This is cool. Initially I was thinking, “Why do I need this??” I really like Blender - it does what I need, and it’s free! But now that I see how much LightWave is used in the SFX industry, it’s getting pretty exciting to start learning it.
This is also the first software that I have ever owned that needed a dongle. Yet one more thing to worry about losing.
I went straight to the LightWave SDK documentation, since I want to learn how to drive LightWave with programs that I write. The API looks pretty good, and hopefully it won’t be too difficult to get a plugin working. My only concern is that I haven’t seen any documentation about computational geometry APIs, or collision detection APIs in the SDK. But that shouldn’t be a problem, since there are some pretty good open-source libraries available.