Elvis "Lewis" Blazencic first saw LightWave back in 1992, but didn't get his hands on it until he started work at his local TV company in 1994, as he reminisces: "We used an Amiga 2000 with 28MHz board and 8 MB RAM (that was powerful machine back then :)). A few months later I bought an Amiga 1200 and 50MHZ accelerated card with 8MB RAM which was a lot faster than A2000 at 28Mhz." He stills works for this local TV station, but he also freelances his skills working on court reconstructions of motor accidents and even idents for US television station Golf TV.

What do you like about the package?

I adore Modeler :). Also I like that that Layout and Modeler are two separate applications. In that way I can save memory resources but most important is that I can be totally focused on one thing without buttons which aren't for modelling. The Hub is great idea and I would like Hub to have more options to make a better integration between Modeler and Layout. I know that some guys want a totally integrated LightWave but I think that it's better separated or at least integrated with the possibility to switch to a separated mode. Another things I like about LightWave is that it's very powerful out of box. I don't need any plug-ins to complete work and that's the best part. Also, the render quality is superb and I'm addicted to radiosity :).

What could be improved for you?

Rendering speed, rendering speed and more rendering speed (I'm talking about radiosity) :). Also I would like to see better Viper support, a few more light types and easier character setup. And most important thing for me would be true NURBS or SubDs (subPatches) with support for Ngons. I often spend 10-15 minutes reshaping some polygon areas on my cars (always full subDs) because I get nasty-looking areas where one point meets 5 polygons or triangles mix with quads. In the end I solve that 99% successfully by reshaping and hiding triangles in not so visible areas but that's a pain and requires a lot of time. :(

What spec machine(s) are you using it on at the moment?

I use P4 2.53Ghz CPU, 1GB DDR RAM, 80+120 GB HDD, Pioneer DVD-RW, 3Dlabs Wildcat VP 760 GFX, Wacom tablet, Pinnacle Pro-ONE NLE card and iiyama VM Pro 451 19" monitor at 1600*1200 resolution (I need lot of free space on screen when I'm modelling and I like the "hide buttons" option :)).