Tell us a bit about yourself.

Okay, my name is Craig A Clark, I live in Sheffield in the United Kingdom, and work for Argonaut Sheffield as an artist, and have done so for a little over two years now.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

Well, my first own experience was shortly after the launch of LightWave 6. I had been using Impulse Imagine for many years, and had seen a good number of things produced with LightWave... Foundation Imaging's work on Babylon 5 probably influenced my big move into CG. I had looked in to buying LightWave previously, but funding came good when LightWave moved up to version 6.

What inspired you about Babylon 5?

I always found Babylon 5 inspiring because it always LOOKED plausible. I could very much believe the premise of what they were telling me in the story. A lot centred around things and places we know, Earth, Mars... space stations... after all, Mir was floating over our heads for a good few years! And Foundation Imaging gave that even more impact by bringing high quality CG to our TV screens. What CG there was looked fantastic, and the stories that formed the backbone of Babylon 5 were far reaching and very engrossing. The quick closing down of stories for the end of season 4, and then a very detached season 5 were minor anti-climaxes to a dynamite series.

Did the fact that all the stuff in it was created with the same computers you had have any impact on your interest in it?

Indeed that was a big factor in my CG interests. Although I didn't use LightWave at the time, I was still using Imagine on my Amiga 500+ (that was a struggle I can tell you - 1MB of ram!). I just remember seeing the opening credits and watching the CG in the episode, and being completely blown away by what I was seeing. Although I was aware that Foundation Imaging's Amigas were somewhat higher spec than mine, the fact I could run the same base software and do stuff was quite inspiring. Of course it was to be a good few years before I actually made the switch to LightWave, but once I had, the likes of Mike Stetson and Mark Kane provided inspiration to create my own models based on Babylon 5. And as the saying goes, I haven't looked back since!

When did you first start using it?

I used it at home when I bought LightWave 6, and made a concerted effort to educate myself in the ways of LightWave. As I had no formal background at all in the arts or computers, this was a slow, but ultimately rewarding process.

What do you like about the package?

Its no-nonsense approach. It lacks all the icons and pretty buttons that are sported by a number of other packages. I know what the buttons do, I know where they are, and a nice text label on them is sufficient without giving up interface acreage to big icons.

Modeler is very powerful and very flexible, and following through to a streamlined and no frills renderer keeps the pretty efficient workflow going.