Tell us a bit about yourself.

I grew up in a small village near Ghent in Belgium. My father was a television technician and a huge film fan, he is definitely the person who inspired my technical and cinematographic interest in the world we live in today. My first "real" computer was an Amiga 500 of course, which I still cannot do away with by the way: it's on this "little beast" my 3D skill started to grow... (By the way I've even still got one of those first NewTek products: Digiview GOLD, the RGB video-digitiser). It is also here I first met LightWave, but soon my Amiga was not powerful enough to keep up with my growing interest in 3D, so I migrated to a PC and after some years of trying out some of the other packages even with some time on SGI machines where the "big software" was located at the time, I finally got back to LightWave when I joined GRID, it was already version 5.0 at the time I guess... That was in the second half of 1997, and as a matter of fact, I am still working there today. If you want to see some of our work visit our site.

You have been at Grid for quite a long time, longer than most CG guys stay in one spot unless they own the company. What makes you stay?

The dynamic team of my colleagues does bond me very much I think, and the flexibility of GRID covering many areas from broadcast commercials and series up to feature films, but who knows what the future might bring, I have not got much time to think of what to do next these latest three years but if there's an offer I can't refuse: who knows?

What do you like about the package?

I feel I need to say that I am not a "full-blooded artist" as some of my current and past colleagues are or have been, but I have always been interested in the "technical" possibilities of a program. For my first "real" job in LightWave I remember I needed to animate a robotic kind of fly for a CD-mercial for GRID... the job had to be finished within a week! With some help from my colleagues I managed to pull it off in LightWave without much experience at all, which means one thing: for me, LightWave is one of the easiest 3D packages to learn. A few weeks later I was setting up a dozen "waterpigs", all animated and linked with tons of followers for "Amerzone", a Benoît Sokal game we worked on and won the first prize with at Imagina. I also like LightWave because there seems to be nothing that cannot be done with it, given some advice from friends and colleagues even from all over the world. For every problem the team at GRID tries to find one (or more) work-arounds, and doing so we have managed to pull off some nice things in the past, for examples see the GRID web page! I must also say that I am mostly a "team-player" in some way, and that also is easily done with LightWave and the combination of layer-rendering and compositing it all together in Digital Fusion...

(DivX - 4.26 MB)

What could be improved for you?

Given time I think LightWave needs to integrate into one single package instead of the two parts at the moment, and animation tools are a "must-have" upgrade - most of the time right now we use Messiah to do the really heavy character animation.

The particle system also needs to be updated and stay integrated in LightWave, and HyperVoxels do work but might be a bit speedier in the render. Also the scene-management could be a bit more transparent...

And one more thingy : a decent, integrated or standalone network-render manager.