How did you get involved with Alan Chan's 12 Hot Women project?

I had been working with Alan on another project before, so this kind of came naturally. I originally got in touch with him through an LW-related mailing list. It's a cool project I think - most of the people on it worked in the USA, and then there was me here in Finland, via the net. It worked surprisingly well, considering that the production was done at HDTV (1920*1080) resolution.

In your LightWave screenshots for 12 Hot Women, you are using sliders for settings. Forgive my ignorance, but is this standard for say, OverCaster, or something? I haven't seen many people use sliders for things other than character animation.

Yep, that's the way most of my stuff is controlled nowadays. All parameters for the lighting rigs in OverCaster, as well as the properties of SkyGen and SeaGen are controlled with sliders.

The sliders adjust control object's morph mixer (which is there for backward compatibility with LW 6.x), which in turn adjust the actual light, surface etc. parameters with channel followers and occasional expressions.

It sounds more complicated than it is - for the user, all that's needed is the sliders.

It's a cool way of controlling stuff - if only you didn't have to specifically select a slider mode to use them...

That's why I included a small utility script called "Next_PP_Controller" in PlugPak. It sorts through the scene, and activates the sliders for the first PlugPak control object found in the scene - the next time it's run it locates the next PlugPak controller, etc. This allows toggling between the control objects with one mouse click or key hit.

Did your one hour render gallery start before 3D Fight Club, or after?

It started much before 3D Fight Club. It must have been something like 1998 or 1999.

After a few five minute 3D Fight Club challenges, an hour feels like an eternity.

Do you do many 3D Fight Club five minute challenges? Do you prefer the longer ones they have sometimes, or even the weeklies?

I try to participate whenever I have the spare time. That's the beauty of it - even on a busy day, there's often possibility to spend a few minutes at 3D Fight Club.

When it comes to longer challenges, my favorite is "Side by Side", where you try to match an existing photograph as closely as you can in 3D. (There are two images on these pages of a caravan and a candelabra that are CG based on real photos).

There's no specific time limit for the challenge, except the duration of each round, which is usually a week.

What is SOAPWISH? I had a quick look at its website and it seems to be a band... :)

Yep, it was... I played the bass in this group (I really regard myself a drummer, or guitarist - but I always end up on the bass in the end as there's usually a serious shortage of bass players - wonder why ;-)

It was originally kind of a company band from my previous job, and the songwriter is an LW animator too. Though it started just as an after-hours hobby, it kind a grew from there - we even had discussions with Polygram Finland for a record deal, they sent a guy to listen us at rehearsals and all...

Then it dried out when the brothers Happonen, guitarist/songwriter and the singer, both moved to the USA - their trip to weekly rehearsals got a little too long after that ;-)

Sounds to me like they weren't trying. :) Thanks for talking to us Eki!