Tell us about yourself.

I am 31 years old, born in Athens on 16 February 1972 and I'm proud of my 1 meter long hair :). I'm not married yet, but I've had a lovely girlfriend for the last five years...

Tell us a bit about where you work and what you do for a living.

Anima Films is a full production house and I work there as a 3D artist and visual effects supervisor. Typical day work could be anything between modelling and animating in LightWave and heavy compositing for commercials, to post processing full length movies for output to film or dealing with special effects for TV series. This company can deal with all the stages of a pre-production, production and all the post production of a show, be it for film or for TV output.

I typically work for about 10 to 14 hours a day and sometimes I wish the day was 48 hours long. Some late hours you can find me online, playing Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory or Jedi Knight 2 - Outcast, my favourite online games at the moment. Just look for the "T.Rex" guy...

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

Hmm... Let me think... If I remember correctly, it was about 10 years ago, in 1993 when I got my hands on a magazine that had an article about the Video Toaster on the Amiga and showed its integrated 3D solution that was called LightWave 3D. There was a render with a Porsche and another with a desk lamp with volumetric beams and soft shadows! When I saw them I said, "WOW!" At the time I had an Amiga 4000 (the very first one that came to Greece) and was playing around with Videoscape, Imagine and Real3D. In 1994, LightWave became standalone, so I got my first copy. I have been a LightWave user ever since and no matter how many other apps I'll use for my work, LightWave will always be there to save the day, no matter how big or small the project is.

I first started using LightWave professionally in 1995, when got a contract at a local TV station, though I was working since 1991 with other 3D apps of that era. Ever since then, I've changed jobs many times along with my use of LightWave. From station IDs to architectural design, from print work to TV commercials and from corporate presentations to film work. I think I've done it all, except games. That is an area I haven't touched yet, because I like work with heavy poly-counts and enormous textures.

What do you like about the package?

That's easy - everything! Heh heh heh! Actually, there are three things I like most in LightWave - the things that LightWave owes its great reputation to - Subdivision surfaces, interface workflow and the rendering engine. Working with SubDivs in LightWave is like playing with clay, but you don't get dirty. They are fast, clean and straightforward. Also, LightWave's workflow is so user friendly and intuitive that, even the untrained one, can jump in, feel at home and start producing quality images. And speaking of quality, the LightWave's renderer is the best out-of-the-box-all-around renderer available in a commercial 3D package, because it combines elements crucial for a production company like easy of use and setup, speed, 128-bit colour depth and enormous flexibility with all the custom shaders and plug-ins available, at the most competitive price.

What could be improved for you?

In Modeler I would like to have stretch-free SubDs for UV maps and fewer tools in general. Yes! I mean, that we have tools that do more or less the same job. Ok, options are good, but I'd like to have fewer, but more flexible, tools to work with. For example, the Smooth Shift tool can be combined with the Smooth Scale and have all their options in the numeric panel to choose from. This would lead to an even more streamlined workflow. All tools should be real time interactive and a non-linear construction history ala Photoshop would be very welcome.

For Layout there are a couple of things. First of all, true sub-pixel or analytic displacements during render time. That would be THE most important addition for me right now. Also, Layout needs the ability to select and edit points and create new endo-morphs, with full spline animation control. That would be neat. Grouping, nesting and linking between surfaces, textures, shaders and expressions, à la Digital Fusion's way would be a dream comes true.

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