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When did you first discover
LightWave?
It was
in 1997. I saw a demo of LightWave while I was
using 3D Studio 4. I was at a LightWave-using
friend’s. I think he used LightWave 5. He
showed me how subdivision surfaces worked (it
was MetaNurbs at the time). Then another friend
arrived with some Hypervoxel animations —
there were all sorts of fluids and smoke and it
was just incredible at the time, I’d never
seen anything like it!
A year later, I had
a demo of LightWave 5.5 or 5.6 at the Cirque d’Hiver
(an annual show in Paris) and the demo artist
was modeling the head of a dragon, live, starting
from just a cube! More SDS! At that point I was
working with Softimage and we were modeling everything
in NURBS — to make a head like that really
took some effort.
When did you start using
LightWave?
Much later, to be
more exact, the 28th March 2001! It
might seem strange, but I bought LightWave 6.0
without ever having tried it before, I just remembered
what I’d seen, what my friends had shown
me.
What do you like best about
LightWave?
The modeler,
the principle of SDS for all organic models. Endomorphs,
IK on a per channel basis, the Surface editor,
the render engine, the ability to re-use the same
skeleton for a variety of meshes, pretty much
everything, really.
The Community as well!
I immediately started using LightWave in production,
my learning was done on the job so to speak. There
was no time for me to train myself. Okay, I did
a couple of the tutorials in the manual, but not
many more than that. Whenever I needed information,
the LightWave community helped me immensely.
Now, whenever I work,
I always have a web browser open in the background…
For you, what’s the
best tool in LightWave?
Hmm, tough question.
I think it’s the idea of subdivision surfaces.
What could be done to improve
LightWave for you?
LightWave?
I’m not a software engineer, but there are
two or three things that I miss: curve-based deformations,
for example. Right now, the only way to deform
something is by using Bones and it’s a bit
difficult (the Conform to Curve tool is a bit
buggy for me to use).
In the same wish list,
I’d love to have lattices in Modeler and
Layout, and maybe the ability to create animated
extrude objects in Layout.
What kind of computer have
you got right now?
I’m currently
using a dual PIII 1000Mhz with 1 Gb Ram, an Elsa
Synergy III graphics card and Windows 2000.
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