LightWave and CyberGraphics RTG support

[mbrantley]

Anybody using LightWave on an Amiga with a CyberGraphicx RTG card? I unearthed a bunch of the old LightWave instructional videotapes by Lee Stranahan, and watching them again got me messing around with LW on my 4000. These tapes are from the era when rendering on an 040 was considered fast.

Anyway, the program works fine using Amiga screens for its interface and for renders. When I use Modepro to promote the program to an RTG screen, however, I get some problems, such as the animation previews do not display. I've tried every setting I can think of, but ultimately I've ended up going back to the Amiga interlace screen for the interface.

I see a Cybergraphics plugin as part of my installation, so I put that into the Layout plugins drawer and get the option of Cybergraphics for renders. But when I attempt to render I am warned that "CyberGFX-preferences not found !!"

Is something wrong with my installation? Am I missing a file somewhere or setting something wrong?

I have a CyberVision 64/3D card with the scandoubler module running CyberGraphics 4.0. This is LightWave 5.0 without the Toaster.

Of course I can render 24-bit images and use a viewer program to look at the renders in all their millions-of-color glory.  But I wonder if it's possible to get LW itself working in RTG modes.

[JaXanim]

I'm really wracking my brain now cos it's years since I tried this. I believe you can promote all the LightWave screens except for the overlaid wireframe anim preview. I think it's locked into the Amiga chipset and doesn't promote to graphics cards.

JaX

[leofoe]

There exists a patch for Lightwave 4 on Aminet. You can render directly to a Cybergraphx screen with this patch. All other screens, perhaps with the exception of the animation preview, can be promoted.

[sigmason]

Mind if I ask which tapes you have?

Sigmason

[mbrantley]

Thanks, everyone, for the responses. I solved half my problems when I went rooting around my old, old LightWave installation -- copied from one hard drive to another over the years, then forgotten and later revived. I found the CyberGFX render prefs utility tucked away in a Utilities drawer and set my desired render screen. Now I get the preview renders in 24-bit splendor.

The other problem of the preview animation not displaying on an RTG screen sounds like something I can't fix. Bummer.

sigmason, I saw your earlier thread looking for these tapes. Unfortunately, I only have the ones you already gave (LW 3D Essentials, Modeler Pts. 1 and 2, Camera and Light Techniques, Surfaces and Textures, Displacement Mapping...) I have dubbed my worn-out tapes to DVD-R.

I wonder if Lee Stranahan would allow these to be distributed free or put online??? I saw him on CNN recently being interviewed about his political satire shorts, which are to be found on YouTube. I will try to get in touch with him. Perhaps he wouldn't mind his old tutorial material being made available again in some way for us hobbyists and old-tech tinkerers.

[sigmason]

If he would do this officially it would be positive for retaining a bit of history I would think.

Heck he could probably make a few bucks if he charged for the distribution (thought I think the original $45 per tape might be a bit much.)

Sigmason

[mbrantley]

Well, I've now solved my problems to my satisfaction. This may be stuff I figured out years ago, but it's amazing what you can forget when you let the Amigas sit idle for a few years.

It's no go on promoting the preview renders in Layout and the moving previews in Modeler to RTG, as mentioned.  What I've done is use ModePro to to only promote the LW screens when set to 800 x 600 or larger, and I simply forego doing the previews in those modes. But I made a setting in ModePro for the 672 x 432 LW screensize, telling it not to promote those screens but to center them (works better on my monitor that way).

So now when I want to render a quick wireframe animation preview, I switch the interface to 672 x 432 easily from within layout. Look at the preview and live with the interlace flicker. Then end the preview and switch back to 800 x 600 or higher from within the program.

Works well. And, as mentioned, I have the 24-bit render display working with CyberGFX now, too.

It's the mid-1990s all over again at my house.