Why did your parents decide to move to Germany?

Well that’s very easy to answer. Freedom. To have the freedom to travel, the freedom to have your own opinions, the freedom to raise your voice...

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

As far as I remember that was back in Autumn ‘95 when I was working at the PC game company Sunflowers. One day my project-manager came in and said "Hey Andràs! Look at this! It’s LightWave 3D, take a look at it - it comes from the Amiga." I replied "What the he*l is an Amiga? Atari rules!" ;)

Well I started to learn LightWave in late ‘95. This time I had no internet access so I had to learn everything from the manuals. It didn’t help that I really had no clue how "3D-Stuff" really works.

I remember that I told my father that I was going to learn something about IK and 3D-Animation (..and believe me I really had NO idea what IK stood for. ;)), but a big motivation was my friend, the 3D-artist who worked next to me. He used PowerAnimator on a SGI. I thought "Hey, come on! That must be possible to do in LightWave too." So the competition began. ;)

Guess what happened? We re-organised the production-pipeline step by step. We ended up using LightWave as our major 3D package (like for the entire in-game graphics for the PC/PSX-game called "TechnoMage"), and as far as I know the in-game graphics of Max-Designs/Sunflowers latest AAA-Hit PC game "Anno 1503" were created in LightWave too.

Were Sunflowers using LightWave when you joined?

Hehe... at the beginning the artists at Sunflowers used 3D-Studio, 3D Max and A/W Power-Animator. I was the only artist at Sunflowers who used LightWave 3D... but that changed ... ;)

After a couple of month I changed to the other internal development team at Sunflowers. They were using 3d studio max. I said " Hi guys! Lets do a competition! If you can model this object faster in 3d studio max than me in LightWave, than we will use 3d studio max. If not, we are gonna use LightWave!" Guess what happened? Sunflowers bought some extra copies of LightWave...

The crew at Max-Design (an external Sunflowers Development-Team from Austria) used Real3D for the in-game graphics in "Anno 1602". A few years ago I showed them what you can do in LightWave. They could not resist! The in-game graphics in the sequel "Anno 1503" (115,000 copies of the game were sold within 2 days!) were created in LightWave.

Did Visitor (Andràs’ well-known alien short) use Messiah?

In early 2000 FX-Studio hired me to work on their demoreel. The "Visitor" 3D short film was the major part of their demoreel. I did the whole 3D modeling and 3D-animation. The objects were modeled and rendered completely in LightWave 6. And the character was animated in Messiah 1.5.7 (the old LightWave plug-in version).

In July we decided to participate at the 3D Festival in Copenhagen with the "Visitor" movie. And "voila!" the "Visitor" was nominated under best 5 short-movies... that was a very big success for us.

What do you like about LightWave?

There are a lot of things that I like about LightWave.

Modeling in LightWave is just a dream. You get fast and intuitive Modeling Tools. I can’t do without features like Bandsaw, Spin-Quads, DragNet and the "mighty" Endomorphs any more.

Modeling with SUBDs is like modeling with real clay with the added bonus that you never run out of clay (a childhood dream come true).

The rendering results are outstanding... LightWave has its own instant good-looking-render look. I don’t know how the guys behind the renderer are doing that, I just know that I can promise my clients a certain cool-looking render result.

Beside the implemented tools that come with LightWave, you have tons of great free and commercial plug-ins.

And last but not least, the LW-community is just great. Ask a question in one of the discussion boards and you get an answer - fast and competent.