Tell us a bit about your team.

Here, within the Dyson Graphics Department we have a large team of people working on a diverse range of material whether it’s for print, web or video production. Part of this team is responsible for creating 3D stills and animations mainly using LightWave.

This work created is for a variety of product imagery from rendering large format stills for retails boxes to rendering animations for in store video or DVD presentations.

Who are the people that make up the illustration team?

Heading up the team is Steve Herridge along with Dave Ball, Lee Wilson, Richard Sudbury and for video compositing Dan "the man" Bird.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

Early nineties, running on a Commodore Amiga along with Video Toaster at a computer show.

When did you first start using it?

We started using LightWave at version 5.5/5.6 so about four years ago, but didn't use it seriously until the MacOS X version was released.

What do you like about the package?

The obvious part of the package for us is the final render quality; it gives us fantastic results straight out of the box without the need for the extra cost of purchasing a separate renderer.

We also found that when we needed to build models from scratch it was less time consuming compared to other packages we had used previously. Modeler has some really great tools that allow you to create complex objects very quickly.

In addition, at the time of original purchase, it was the only real professional option to run on the Mac platform.

What could be improved for you?

The number one option would be a network renderer that can render a single frame across multiple Macs (otherwise known as a bucket renderer) as some of the images we produce are at 11000 x 6000 pixels with over 5 million polygons which require a week to render on a single machine - a full implementation of Apple's XGrid technology would be perfect.

As we create a lot of animations of arrows to demonstrate airflow it would be nice to have a better and more interactive tool that handles this.

What spec machines are you using it on at the moment?

The studio is totally MacOS X based running a mixture of Dual 2Ghz G5's with 4GB RAM and Dual 1.4GHz G4's with 2GB RAM along with 23" Cinema HD displays.

We do have a single Athlon 64 based PC with is used for model translation and for running any PC only LightWave plug-ins.

Are there any plug-ins you wouldn't be without?

We couldn't live without FPrime, Worley's rendering plug-in is now used for practically all of our work. We also use G2 and Pictrix plug-ins including FirstContact.