-
Cinema 4D vs Lightwave on mac
Hi all
I’m a 3D newbie trying to decide which 3D package to purchase for a growing, fully mac based, video business.
I have no drama learning any package but performance and productivity are most important particularly in regard to rendering speeds.
I have trial versions of Lightwave 9, Cinema 4D 10 and have previously trialed Maya.
I wrote off Maya because in the Mac environment it does not support 64 bit processing and it’s rendering was very slow. My housemate has been using Cinema 4D on a PC and I noticed his high quality rendering was infinitly faster than Maya on my mac. Thus – I began looking elsewhere.
I really like the lightwave 9 interface – no nonsense/space saving – seems good – but am finding it difficult to get info on rendering speeds for mac etc. Also the new pricing is very attractive.
Basically if Cinema 4D is faster at rendering and better in a mac environment I would be tempted to lean in that direction. Am a little concerned at being able to produce photo realistic results in C4D as lightwave seems to be better in this area with a simple off the shelf purchase of the product.
With future in mind – I have no drama purchasing new equipment/video cards to improve performance or to introduce other terminals for network rendering – just need some guideance on which piece of software is more suited to creating a viably productive environment on a mac system.
Any input would be appreciated:
My current system is: G5 Dual / 1.8 GHz / 2.5 GB RAM / GeForce FX 5200 video card
Thanks in advance all.
-
4 Replies
-
The question of which tool to use largely hinges on what you are actually producing, not so much performance on a given platform. Your main concern seems to be the rendering, and that is really the part where neither of the two apps can win (compared to other programs). Both have their share of legacy issues and quirks. If you want quality, go for Lightwave. At the moment only finalRender for C4D can give comparable flexibility and results to Lightwave’s node editor, but it’s not available for Mac yet, so it’s a moot point. Texturing and adjusting materials are infinitely easier in Lightwave, even in the old layer based surface editor.
As for speed – well, I’m sorry to say so, but C4D being faster is a myth that does not live up to reality upon closer scrutiny. It’s only fast if you use average antialiasing, no motion blur and no other fancies – but in such situations LW is similarly fast. As soon as you depend on 3D motion blur or similar things, C4D slows down to a crawl. I daresay LW in those situations behaves much better. Not that it’s muchg faster, but at least it’s predictable. Also do not forget that LW’s rendering part is currently being reworked quite heavily and LW 9.2, which is not far away, will bring even more improvements and speedups.
Finally, and please forgive me here, if you’re really serious about 3D, make your life easy and get a PC. You certainly can work on a Mac, but there are any number of OpenGL issues, many plugins are not available for it (like finalRender and an assortment of really useful free tools, both for LW and C4D) and a few other things that might pose a problem. There are also certain things under development (like a VRay bridge for C4D) that will take a long time before they wil lever come to a Mac and if you’re really interested in quality, you will not want to criple yourself and loose that potential.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
-
I just wanted to add that the new intel macs can run windows and MacOS side by side, so the OS no longer holds you back from buying any software or plugin you like. And regarding OpenGL, multithreaded OpenGL is on it’s way for Mac computers, bringing up to twice the OpenGL speed (that’s what they say). Blizzard is already using this for their new World of Warcraft add-on. Beside this, up to date Macs offer competitive OpenGL scores:
https://www.3dfluff.com/mash/cinebench/top.php
So you should try out the demo versions by yourself and base your purchase on the feature set, workflow and stability each software offers.Kind regards,
Arndt von Koenigsmarckhttps://www.vreel-3d.de
https://www.vonkoenigsmarck.de -
Also, it appears that VRay for C4D will appear for PC and Mac at or about the same time.
-
…considering that OSx runs on AMD PCs, get a few PCs for a price of the MAC hardware.
(posted from a MAC, a VERY HOT MBP :-))
IQ0
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up