dmunch

How long has it been since Autodesk has done ANYTHING with Lightscape. Years, no? Not a patch, not a service release, not a peep. Is Lightscape dead?

It's pretty obvious to me that Lightscape has fallen prey to Autodesk's legacy of buying out competing products and shelving them. It's ashame because you can't beat the quality of LS renderings. But the software needs work.

Jeff Mottle

Yes, Dan Development of Lightscape has been stopped for a number of years. I can tell you officially that there will be no more Lightscape releases. Autodesk VIZ is what has taken its place. (Although I'll be the first to tell you that Lightscape still does it better, at least for now.) For now Autodesk continues to sell and support Lightscape, but I'm pretty confident that this will soon come to an end.
So in short, yes Lightscape is dead, but there is still a userbase out there that continues to use it in production, and will probably continue to do so for a number of years.

[ September 25, 2002, 01:02 PM: Message edited by: Jeff Mottle ]

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Jeff Mottle
CGarchitect.com

Ernest Burden

Support?

And how do we access this support? Is there even an official email address left?

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

Jeff Mottle

Support...what do you mean. I'm the Support guy. Where have you been for the last two years.
Kidding of course.

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Jeff Mottle
CGarchitect.com

dmunch

At least we still have you Jeff.

It's ashame LS is dead. Why would I want VIS when I do all the modeling right in acad.

And people wonder why I say that Revit is already dead. Everyone seems to honestly believe Autodesk will continue developing it. BS! They are a monopoly, pure and simple. Buy out the competitors and continue putting out crappy software.

Ernest Burden

That is not a joke, it's true. And my point, as well. But you wrote that Autodesk still sells and supports Lightscape, which I find the real joke. "We don't believe in it, but we'll take you money in the meantime".

Not that this is new territoty, either.

I would like to see more attention paid to we current and former Lightscape customers by Rod and crew with regard to the inevitable upgrade path (and 3x - 7x price increase) to Viz or Max--assuming we choose to stay Autodesk customers at all. Those people know LS and are key to the new CG products as well. I feel let down that Autodesk has not made the transition easier.

They could start by clearly admitting that Lightscape is a deadend product to them. Everybody knows it except them, it appears. This is classic AutoDesk behaviour, and I think it says a lot about what they produce that they repeatedly buy out competetors and kill them.

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

dmunch

Well, our office for one has decided to no longer upgrade our Autocads. Revit seemed like the first real glimmer of hope to pull us out of the acad quicksand, but alas, not to be.

I'm wondering, is there another program comparable to LS? I've never seen renderings by other software as good as what LS can do. What's the next best thing?

MrCAD

have you ever heard about Desktop Radiance ? thats another alternative..very impressive renderings I've seen from that app.
check it here http://radsite.lbl.gov/deskrad/

goodluck,

MrCAD

Ernest Burden

Very imressive renderings are only part of the story. Day-to-day production usability is at least as important as slick renderings. I can fix pictures in Photoshop (not that I want to), but I do not want to have a stress-filled workday fighting with software to get images out the way I like them.

Lightscape is highly flawed, if for no other reason than it's vintage, but it has a very professional and architectural workflow. I've tried MANY other products (though few of the recent GI ones) and still prefer to work in LS.

But what are we to do? The product is not ours to upgrade, and those that owned it CHOSE to sell it, and us with it. It was their right and I do not fault them for it. I just haven't figured out where to go next.

And Jeep stopped making their cashcow Cherokee. That sucks, but my '99 will last a while.

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Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

Brian Cassil

Either I don't have any idea what AutoDesk is trying to do with thier products or (a more likely scenario) AutoDesk doesn't have any idea what they are trying to do with thier products. My case in point:

- AutoCad is the industry standard plain and simple. Sure there are others but at least here in the U.S., it's the Alpha and Omega of drafting.

- They are trying so hard to cram the idea of "Model Based Design" or "SBM" (see the news link to intelligent modeling posted today, Sept. 26) with Architectural Desktop, and they get pretty edgy if you tell them you're still using Viz (or Max) and not ADT to model with.

- So now we have Viz, a product that has undergone few, if any, enhancments to the modeling features since version 1. The upgrades in that time have mainly been to the interoperability between it and ADT and to the rendering system. So if you do things the way they intend you to do them, Viz is relegated to nothing more then a renderer. A 2500 dollar renderer. There are at least a dozen others that can do a much better job of rendering for a fraction of that cost.

I of course realize that it is all a part of a grand marketing scheme (which now includes Architectural Studio). It's just that if you think about it, one way or another you are buying a lot of software that overlap in thier technology.

It would make sense to me that they could continue to develope Viz (and PLEASE start adding some modeling enhancments like a decent NURBS modeler, etc.) with all the added rendering features for those of us who are vizualization artists, and then create another, less expensive version of Lightscape for those who do all thier rendering in Acad/ADT.

Having said all that I actually use Max because it is of great benefit to me and the company I work for to have all the animation features. But that is a discussion for another time.

[ September 27, 2002, 09:33 AM: Message edited by: Brian Cassil ]

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