LightWave v9.5 Update Includes:

Character Animation Enhancements

* Hair and Fur System
* Collada, FBX and OBJ I/O support
* Enhanced IK and Animation Systems


Lighting, Rendering and Surfacing Enhancements

* Lighting System is now an API
* IES, Spherical and Dome Light types
* Enhanced Area and Linear Lights
* Faster and higher quality GI Rendering
* Disk-Based GI Caching
o Static Cache (only the Camera moves)
o Animated Cache (anything moves)
* Interpolated Soft Reflections/Refractions for Node-base surfacing
* Oren-Nayar Shading Option for Many Materials
* Optimized Materials and Shaders


SDK and LScript Improvements

* Light Plug-in Class for Third Party Lights and Light Plug-ins
* SDK Support for New GI Functions and Disk Cache
* SDK Support for New IK and Animation Capabilities


UI and Workflow Enhancements

* Composition Tool Overlays in Camera View
* OpenGL GLSL Enhanced View for New Lighting System
* Audio Waveform in the Graph Editor

Ah - good...
Drakensang kept me busy for quite a while so I didn't really give my new quad core something to play with...

I'm eager to see if radiosity really will be as fast as it was announced (pretty much like you now just need seconds where you used to need minutes)...

I guess a new hair und fur system also was about time although I think I won't use it but probably a nice toy to play around with. I'm still waiting for a bit more control over hard / soft edges - especially nice for not so high-poly modelling...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

No need to wait. Just mark the polys, press Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V (cut and paste) and they are in the same position again but edges are cut. This way you get hard edges. This works fast and is very easy.

Though you could use some more complicated edge-tools as well, you can even create very small polygons next to each other, but it would take too much time and too much polygons.

Well that's no real solution (as it's just a fake and doesn't give you the desired effect on just one edge) and also doesn't do anything to the basic problem of Lightwave's handling of smoothing groups, vertex normals and hard/soft edges...

This here pretty much shows the problem behind it:


That's also why someone developed this shader for Lightwave:
Without:


With:


So if you're going for something you don't want to have a very high poly count it gets - well difficult to hardly possible. You also can have a look at THIS THREAD (where those pics are from)...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

If you create the mesh in LW then it works fine. But what you mentioned can happen if you import models into LW.

Maybe the importer needs some improving.
But regarding the modeling workflow: I have no idea how you can improve that from the point of view of the user. I do not want to change every normal of every polygon manually. I still want fast control like the cut and paste technique. Smoothing groups like in Max are ancient as well.

But if you have a genius idea to do better then please make a feature request at Newtek. There is an internet form and an email especially for that.

Regards

no need for a genius idea. maya handles this well, blender too,...

but the original lightwave creators (they work on modo now) unfortunately didn't seem to like the idea of having good control over edge smoothing. modo doesn't support setting edges hard/soft either.

if it's just about the shading error in pic 1: use micro (edge) bevels around the holes (universal solution) and/or the "smoothing" angle limiter in the surface editor (at least will be rendered correctly in lightwave).
for angle based smoothing, i still use wings3d's "auto smooth" function which splits up the model automatically, which makes unwrapping the model much easier and solves almost all shading issues.

speaking of importing, i just tried to import a fbx in 9.5, and the texture coordinates got all messed up. can you confirm that?

Well I think Maya has the best approach (at least I was told so as I don't own Maya) and that's pretty much selecting an edge and assinging a hard/soft edge command on it and that's it. Lightwave really lacks a bit of all that vertex normal stuff. There also were numerous user wishes for this for quite some time now...

Well apart from your technique afaik another way to get such an effect is assigning another surface to the specific polies...

EDIT:
@broozar:
Those models aren't mine but they show Lightwave's lack of some "minor" features in some areas. It's also not about how to correct this but that it's quite some annoying work which doesn't have to be there...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

in maya each edge has an threshold angle. you can for example assign 45° to all edges of the model. if an edge has a more acute angle it will be hard, otherwise soft. in case 45° doesn't give the wanted result on every part of the model you can simply set some edges to a different threshold.

the difference is that in maya this threshold can be set per edge. in lightwave and modo only per material.

I can use different materials (with different smoothing angles) and the cut and paste technique. So I can create smooth and hard edges perfectly in LW.

But if I import an obj model then it needs some re-work. And that can be annoying indeed. Maybe Maya can do it better, but I cannot afford 7,000.- Euro plus paid upgrades and support for that.

I hope Newtek realizes this little issue. It is really a minor problem since I never stumbled over it up to now. I started using LW with version 7.5 and we have 9.5 now.
I just heard of it from you and this imported high poly mesh.

It will not happen if you model in LW directly.