First there was a toaster and it switched video like nothing before it, and then Tim gathered software from his friends Allen and Stuart and thus Lightwave was born.
I typed this in once already and the org ate it, so this version may be a little shorter. As of version 3.5 of Lightwave (actually it started out in 3.2, but that was a fairly small distribution) an option called Screamernet (after the 4 MIP processor product called the Screamer that it originally talked to) was added to product. It allowed one computer to control the rendering of at first dozens and eventually 1000 and now basically infinite nodes. To do this they need to talk on a network, though if you dont have a network, you can cheat by having each process run the exact same lightwave project and skip frames so each computer is doing different frames. Thats how we did it before lightwave 3.5. Someone was talking about the cost of lightwave being one of the reasons they are running it on there Amiga. I would like to point out that any version of lightwave to Intel/Mac Lightwave 9.2 is $395, so its $400 cheaper then what was commented on here. In addition there are educational discounts and educational bundles (5 or more licenses) that are very nicely priced. As for the speed comparison, as one of the guys who wrote the infamous VTU article, I'd like to point out that when Intel lightwave came out at version 4.0, I bought a Pentium 100Mhz to run it on (that was a very fast computer then) and it ran the standard test suite 10X faster then my 25Mhz 68040 A4000. In this day and age, writing to the disk takes longer then render time on those scenes, if I send them to be fast raid, its basically realtime, now I tend now to do high def and lots of AA and add lots of refraction etc which adds to the time, but if I run the default scene as it came with 4.0, it will run them 400-500X faster then the P100 on a modern PC, and if throw a big render machine at it, its even worse. But I'm not trying to discourage you, after all, I'm the one who got lightwave to run on his PDA under UAE, but thats another story.
-Tig
