When did you see LightWave for the first time?

I first looked at LightWave back in the summer of 1993. A lot of people praised it, but my Amiga 500 was not big enough to handle a Video Toaster card! It had one particular difference from the other programs I had seen at that time (including Imagine and Real 3D that I used back then): It had a more creative touch. It had the right tools in the right place and its render quality was the best I had seen.

When did you first start using it?

I started working with version 3.1 in 1994. The funny thing was that at that time I was working with Imagine mostly, but after one point, when we needed some things in the University urgently, a major crash did not allow me to use it any further, so I jumped to LightWave on an Amiga 4000. I have been using it ever since!

What do you like about the package?

You get what you want, with better results than you expect. I have friends around here that are working their heads off to produce on other platforms what I can do with LightWave in moments. It is a very creative package and it truly lets you focus on the world you are building. No more anxiety about the results. I know that everything that I am building will work out. Also, the flexibility, the quality of rendering and the atmosphere are very difficult to compete with! Today we use it almost for every need that we have since it is the most flexible application and produces great results quickly and easily.

What could be improved for you?

Dynamics should be my first answer. Rigid bodies and cloth. It is something that is quite needed lately, especially cloth. On the other hand, it would be nice to see more integration between Layout and Modeler. For example, in a city building project, if I wanted to make some changes on the point coordinates of an object to match a specific placing, I had to drag both different objects into Modeler, try and place them close by and make my changes. It would be helpful to be able to make such object-oriented corrections within the scene, so that you can have an accurate preview of the effect.

What spec machines are you using it on at the moment?

The current workstation I have is a Dual AthlonMP 1.2GHz with 1GB RAM and an Elsa Gloria III (Quadro2 Pro) Graphics card. The pre-rendered scenes are done with a rack of 20 AthlonMP CPUs of the same frequency. The past two weeks I have also been working for an external company (because of this challenging project), where LightWave is installed on a Pentium IV 2.66GHz with 1GB of RAM and a GeForce 4800 graphics card.

Are there any plug-ins you wouldn't be without?

The plug-ins I use mostly are Digital Confusion and VectorBlur. There are many awesome plug-ins, especially out in the market, but still I haven't touched many of them. I have learned to find workarounds in major problems and that has made me less dependant on anything specific.