LightWave 11.0 was released on
February, 2012. It has a lot of nice goodies, like Bullet dynamics
and new virtual studio tools. It also finally starts to catch up
with everyone else with built in instancing and flocking. And with
those new features, a few new additions have been made to the
“Production Style” configs, as well as the default,
non-production style configs. Those configs that were apparently
added to make it easier for new users to learn LightWave.
However, this release does something
that no other release did. See if you can spot it here:
Chances are you didn't spot it.
That's because it isn't there. I'm talking about the manual.
There's an addendum, but that only covers the new stuff in 11, and
barely mentions anything else about the software. You would think
that a company that's trying to attract new users would make some
kind of effort to make their software easier to learn. Something
more than just changing their keyboard shortcuts.
LightWave 11.6 still doesn't have a
manual. Again, check for yourself, at the bottom of the image, taken
from the LightWave 3D site itself...
Yes, that is a manual for LightWave 10. Not
Eleven...
Ten.
They couldn't even bother to at least rename the file? They did it
before, for LW 10. You see, the manual for LW 10 is actually the
manual for LW 9, complete with screen captures from LW 9 throughout.
You can tell by the lighter gray color and slightly more colorful
buttons. At least they put the effort to rename the thing to version
10 and even updated the various headings to match. That is, if
you're looking at the correct manual.
What?
When you download the manuals, you have two options: Screen
resolution or print resolution. Why two? That question gets better
as you read on.
The screen resolution manuals are all contained in a single zip file that's 92.3 megabytes in size. The print resolution manuals are in a separate file that's 115.9 megabytes in size; a full 23.6 megabytes larger. I assume this is to save on the download time; if you have a slow connection, you download the smaller file, though you can't tell how big the files are beforehand. The problem is the screen resolution manuals, which, unzipped, are called “hires” (just to add to the confusion since these are the lower resolution of the two), do not contain the same information as the higher resolution print versions. Compare the same page from the Layout 10 manual here.
The screen resolution manuals are all contained in a single zip file that's 92.3 megabytes in size. The print resolution manuals are in a separate file that's 115.9 megabytes in size; a full 23.6 megabytes larger. I assume this is to save on the download time; if you have a slow connection, you download the smaller file, though you can't tell how big the files are beforehand. The problem is the screen resolution manuals, which, unzipped, are called “hires” (just to add to the confusion since these are the lower resolution of the two), do not contain the same information as the higher resolution print versions. Compare the same page from the Layout 10 manual here.
The first image is the hires manual, and shows images from 9. The
second image is the print version, and has those images updated with
similar images from taken from the LW10 interface. So, you need to
download the larger of the two files no matter what. That is, if
you're aware that the print version is the more complete one. But is
it? The screen version is the one with the nice cover art on the
first page. The print one only has the LW logo and a space to write
down your license numbers. Basically it starts at page 2 of the
screen version. So, if you want the pretty cover, get the screen
version. If you want a few updated images, get the print version.
As for any other benefits of having two different resolution
manuals, that's another good question. Aside from a few updated
images, some of which are rotated 90 degrees, most of the graphics
are the same between the two, right down to the low resolution pencil
graphics that are adjacent to the sidebar notes. Yet, in the manuals
for LW9, those same graphics are high resolution, in both the
print and the screen versions.
 |
| You only get this hi-res version in the manual for LightWave 9. |
So, if you're new to LightWave, you have my sympathies. Rather
than having everything in one place – well, six technically,
because there are three manuals times two sets of content – where
it's easy to find, you get to rummage through an addendum to see
what's new and then hunt for the rest in the other manuals. That's
not so bad, until you run into something like this:
 |
| I see no way this could be confusing. Nope. No sirree Bob. |
This is taken from the manual for LW11, er 10.
Since LightWave 11 has removed some very useful features, these
descriptions, along with many others, are wrong. In this
case, the settings for Samples are no longer present in
11. You'll also find references to individual Light Quality
settings. Again, these are gone, but still present in the LW 11,
uh, 10, I mean, 9 manuals that you are
offered.
So, LW 11.6 is out and there's still no real manual for it. Why not? Yet another really good question. You would think that the LightWave Group would not only be trying to make the software more attractive to new users by having a manual, but that they might even consider not having a manual to be just a tad embarrassing. One could even venture to say it's unprofessional. For a group that's constantly trying to make their software more like the competition, maybe they should try for some of the lower hanging fruit like this first. After all, how long does it take to write a manual, especially when most of it is already written?
Let's see... Most of the pages have at least one or two images, if not more and there's a fair amount of white space. I figure, by actually counting a few lines which average ~13 words per line, a full text page is about 850 words, so let's cut that in half and round down to be nice and allow for images and white space, and figure the average page has 400 words. The current manuals have 441 pages (Layout – screen), 371 pages (Modeler - screen), and 427 pages (Rendering – screen). That's a total of 1239 pages. Let's also add in the 353 pages from the LW11 addendum, which brings us to 1592 pages total. At an average of 400 words per page, that's a whopping 636,800 words.
According to the About screen in 10.1, that was
released in July, 2011, so it should be fairly safe to assume they
started work on 11 sometime in August, since they'd probably want to
take a break. That gives us a minimum of five and a half months to
get a manual ready for the release of 11.0, which happened on Jan 31,
2012, assuming they started on that in mid August. That's roughly
168 days, or 118 days not including weekends. If we take the 118
days, that means that on average, they would need to write 5,396
words per day. That might sound like a lot, but it isn't. That's
224 words per hour, or 448 words per hour over 12 hours. That's
just a touch over 7 words per minute. And remember, most of that has
already been written. If we just look at the count for the addendum,
that's only 141,000 words, or 1,196 words per day or 1.6 words per
minute. If you rolled in weekends, that's even fewer words per day.
In just a few hours, I've already written more than that here, and
I've been taking screen captures as well.
“But the addendum has more than just the new stuff in 11.0” you say? Ok, let's include the time it took to release 11.6. That came out on Oct 30, 2013. That's a total of 807 days, or 634 weekdays. Now we only need to deal with 100 words per day. And once again, remember, most of the stuff has already been written; it just needs to be edited to fit the current software.
“But the addendum has more than just the new stuff in 11.0” you say? Ok, let's include the time it took to release 11.6. That came out on Oct 30, 2013. That's a total of 807 days, or 634 weekdays. Now we only need to deal with 100 words per day. And once again, remember, most of the stuff has already been written; it just needs to be edited to fit the current software.
Another way to look at it; if it takes a half hour per page to
write and edit, that should only take 100 8-hour days to complete,
and it really shouldn't take that long per page. That frees up at
least 18 days from the estimate above, and gives a complete set of
manuals with time to spare.
For software that costs $1500, it's bad enough that they don't
offer you a printed manual, and charge $25 for a physical DVD. But
to not even bother providing an up-to-date manual? That's just
completely insulting.
And for those who are curious, Open Office says this article is
1395 words long.