lw Cad lite 5.2
How will this LW CAD plug-in behave with Cinema 4D?
| | Price €119 (£106, $136) Company Wtools3d Website lwcad.com
F or many people, one of the reasons to keep using Newtek’s Lightwave 3D was LW CAD, a plugin by developer Viktor Velicko, which adds a series of Cadstyle drawing and modelling functions and even bringing NURBSS surfaces, UV mapping and real-time Booleans to Lightwave’s toolset.
However, as Lightwave’s industry presence continues to decline, Victor has opted to port LW CAD to both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. After six months of open beta testing, LW CAD Lite 5.2 is now commercially available, and we reviewed the Cinema 4D version for this release.
This initial release cherrypicks some of the key tools from LW CAD, but by no means includes all of its features. The line/curve drawing tools are absent (presumably because C4D is well catered for in this area) as are the NURBS surfaces as well as a host of minor tools and features. But what we do get is the base primitive creation and modify tools plus the Archviz toolset, for the generation of walls, floors and roofs, plus windows, doors, fences, pipes and roof tiles or shingles.
So even with this first release, you can block out a building – either as a solid object or as walls and floors – add windows and doors, which automatically Boolean themselves into the structure, tile the roof and fence off the neighbours. And you can do all this in about ten minutes once you know what you’re doing.
The most immediately useful tool is the snapping function, which lets you drag out objects aligned to surfaces on another object and position items according to a userdefinable grid. It’s similar to C4D’S own snapping system, but with more options.
One of the coolest features is the Shingles tool, which fully clads a roof shape with roof tiles, plus ridge and slope tiles, all with a single click. However it only works at realworld scales, so if you’ve built your structure too small, you might end up with half a dozen massive tiles on your roof. And even then, we still find the tiles to be too large (especially the ridge and slope tiles). It would be far preferable to just have the ability to scale the tiles so they’re at least aesthetically pleasing, if not true to scale.
The live Booleans is also impressive, but is currently limited to LW CAD’S own
primitives – so cubes, pyramids, cylinders, roofs and arc sections. We encountered a few times that pushing a cylinder’s side count too high caused the Boolean to produce a single flat side, although most of the time the windows and doors were added with no problems whatsoever. However, it’s currently a case of eyeballing things in conjunction with the snapping grid. Hopefully a future update will instigate a numeric panel, so you can consistently and repeatedly add windows and doors of a set size.
In use, LW CAD’S workflow feels very different to the one Cinema 4D users will be familiar with; the Move, Rotate and Scale tools, for example, have the feel of the Transpose tool in Zbbrush, and take some getting used to (frankly, we’re still struggling with them). The reliance on Cinema 4D’s Properties panel also makes the process a bit ‘clicky’, whereas 3ds Max’s non-modal panel is more user-friendly.
For a version 1.0, this release of LW CAD Lite is undoubtedly powerful and has some great tools. It won’t be of use to everyone, but is ideal for the arch vis crowd and has exciting potential for future upgrades, with stairs, paths and roads, architectural detailing, and of course, NURBS surfaces yet to be ported over. Some of the line drawing functions would also be useful to have, despite C4D’S spline toolset. So while this release is solid enough, hopefully you’ll be buying into a whole host of new features down the line.