When did you see LightWave for the first time?

It was in 1995, in one of the biggest Video studios in Zagreb. We were doing video capture there for the Football Glory game (released on PC CD-ROM with FMV). I saw guys there doing some great things in 3D using LW.

When did you first start using it?

After completing Football Glory, we started work on a new game engine. While the engine was being worked on, the art people worked on pre-production and testing. At that time I started working on a game, called Artefact, with couple of friends. The game was designed to be an isometric squad-based RTS (like Xcomm, UFO). For that game we decided to model and render sprites instead of doing 2D pixelpushing. That was the first time I started using LightWave.

What do you like about the package?

Modeler is extremely powerful and fast to work with. Its polygonal tools are top notch. Modeler's workflow allows us to use different approaches to achieve the same results - very important for maintaining the speed of production. Often, you are required to make changes to models or animation on a daily basis, in order to fit them into game better and the LightWave way of working makes our job much easier. Also, our level editing department recently started learning LightWave for our new game - guys who never saw it or worked with it before are already doing some great stuff.

What could be improved for you?

With the speed and power of today's hardware we expect and want to see a more real-time approach in the next generation of 3D applications. Things like shadows, hardware-accelerated geometry deformations, texture layers, realistic rendering, all that could be done in real-time. With that paradigm, the user would be able to see his or her final product in almost the same way as a rendered version. This would help game developers to have a more accurate preview of how things will look inside the game. It would be even nicer to embed the game engine inside LW.

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

I have 2.4ghz P4, dual monitor setup and GeForce4 Quadro.

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

Usually there are a lot small plug-ins that make life easier, like Poz_Extender, Railselect, Edge tools... Since we aren't doing much rendering, most plug-ins are either modelling or animation tools.