And dynamic parenting is Great for character work involving props changing hands (Just ask tephadon over at the LW forum) and the LW graph editor simply cant be beat in my opinion. and dont forget you speed up your renders by disabling the "Show render in progress" option. And as you stated the only way to beat lightwaves renderer in other programs is with some very expensive external renderer like Arnold or Brazil, fina lrender, renderman etc. which can cost as much as buying an entire application not to mention the hassle of the install scripts. BTW Norbert, have you downloaded the Siggraph LW Demo files yet There are some great Scene files to learn from through reverse engineering.
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