How old are you?

30, going on 6.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

I first saw LightWave v5 at the first Australian Effects & Animation Festival in Sydney, Australia in 1996.

I was working as lead artist at a kids' game developer. I'd gone to AEAF to investigate the new generation 3D packages to see which one we should use. I had used 3D Studio up till that point, but I wanted to get a better overall picture of what was available.

I was immediately blown away by LightWave. It had almost everything I could think of wanting right out of the box. Metanurbs were amazing, the ability to add bones and rig complex characters was all there, no need for any absurdly expensive plug-ins.

When did you first start using it?

I chose LightWave as our 3D package, and we got copies of it as soon as we returned from AEAF. So mid 1996. We weren't doing a lot of 3D work at the time, so it wasn't really until late 1996 that I started using LightWave more extensively.

In early 1997 I started work on what would become ZGE's first game X-Men: Ravages of Apocalypse. I believe it's one of, if not the first, real-time 3D game to have all its modelling and animation done in LightWave.

What do you like about the package?

I like so much about LightWave. It's so easy to use, the menus and workflow make it very quick to develop with. I do mostly remote, freelance work and LightWave makes it very easy to share resources, and the small .lws files make it quick and painless to send scene/animation changes to clients. You can't go past one of the most important features of LightWave, the extremely high level of support from NewTek, and the fantastic user community.

As far as specific features, I couldn't live without SubDs. Endomorphs are fantastic, Weight maps are so powerful in so many ways. I love using LightWave to animate characters. I find it intuitive and very quick to animate with.

I don't understand the common perception that LightWave isn't good for animation. I've watched the rigging process done by skilled users with other packages, and more often than not I find myself thinking how much quicker the same thing can be done using LightWave. And as far as animating a character, the process of "move foot here" seems to be the same no matter what package you're using.

The sheer number of freely available plug-ins available is great too. Almost as soon as I think of something new I'd like to do, someone creates a plug-in to do it.