I am using Lightwave 11.6. for around 2 years now, very happy with it. I had to make a decision between C4D and LW to purchase. First I seemed to prefer C4D, because I had previous experience with it years ago and felt more familiar with the graphic style user interface with icons, instead of Lightwaves text buttons. But I found out, that the functionallity (comparing packages of the same prices by that time) was larger, or at least more suitable to my needs with Lightwave. It seemed to me I would have to purchase a number of plugins on top of C4D, so finally I decided to go with LW.

Had a hard time getting used to the UI layouts first for some weeks, but this happens with any new software you try after being experienced with something else (I had used C4D R9 before, and a lot of Hexagon, some ZBrush). Blender is a good software obviously, I don't want to question that, but I could never ever get used to the 'alien' concept behind the user interface, no matter how hard I tried. Such a pity... But then I started really loving Lightwave. It is sooooo stable, I cannot remember EVER having crashed it. My Hexagon crashed at least every several hours, sometimes every some minutes... I also like the concept of having various objects, subdivided in various layers, it is really well thought out to handle even huge and extremely complex models very easily.

Also had a hard time learning the UV-Mapping strategies, but again, I guess this is just the same for any modeler which you are unfamiliar with. Still have a lot to learn and improve, when it comes to uv-mapping complex objects, but up to now I could handle everything I needed to.

Recently I purchased a first commercial plugin, LW Brush, and this is an amazing addon which allows (between others) for kind of organic softbody modeling almost like in ZBrush.

About the Lightwave forum here, I dropped in from time to time during the past 2 years, but found it basically dormant, apart from some hardcore members who occasionally dropped in just to exchange greetings, it seemed to me. I never felt a chance of getting integrated, so I kept it at just watching and reading.

So that's my introduction, haha, at least I can help keeping the thread alive for another 45 days ;-)

Poser Pro 2014 GameDev, Lightwave 11.6.3, Blacksmith3D Pro 6, Bryce 7, Carrara Pro 8.5, Reality 4 & LuxRender, Python 2.7 & Wx-Python, UV-Mapper Pro, XFrog 3.5, Paintshop Pro X7, Apophysis 7x64

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Don't render faster than your artistic guardian angel can fly...