How old are you?

Mats: We are both 25 years old.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

Trond: Some guy showed it to Mats at art school in 1999.

When did you first start using it?

Trond: Mats started off in 1999 and taught me the basics in January 2000.

What do you like about the package?

Mats: We love that the navigation is text-based instead of moronic pictograms that just complicate everything. Nice colours. Please stay real and try to avoid the OSX, WinXP-look.
It's quick and not quirky. Feels sort of DOS-like. You feel like a pro whatever level you are at just by the look of it ;)

Trond: The main reason why we like it is the extremely photorealistic native render... and at a low price. Hehe, we should get paid for this ;) lol

Estimated render times. It should be possible, shouldn't it? :)
A built-in "HDRI maker 2000".
Motion Designer should be improved - Better presets, fewer settings, cleaner interface.
Better native import-export possibilities.
Faster radiosity engine :)

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

We use a lot of machines :) Ranging from Dual Xeon 2GHz to an old Pentium 3 800 MHz.

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

Skytracer - we love it. LW Stripe, Bandsaw pro.

Did you guys come to our user meeting at 3D Festival? I saw that you'd been on your news page...

Yeah, and you did quite a job :) Nice show. Loved the "almost-auto-walkcycle". Too bad we didn't win a copy of LW.

Did you drink some of our excellent Bordeaux wine at the user meeting, or did you stick to tried and trusted Tuborg? :)

Mats: We got drunk on the Tuborg...

Trond: ...but we tasted the wine :)

MIR Visuals seems to offer a wide range of services. Are you both architects, industrial designers, something else? :)

Trond: We met at the Royal Academy of Art and Design in Norway.

Mats: I'm educated as an interior architect/furniture designer and Trond studied Visual Communication.

What does the MIR stand for in MIR Visuals?

Trond: MIR means peace in Russian. A while ago, we were really into the aesthetics of old analogue space gadgets and stuff. When we first started the company, our office was only six square meters in size and looked like the cockpit of a Russian spaceship :p

Mats: So MIR doesn't really stand for anything, it has just stuck with us. People seem to remember it, and now we are just known as "The MIR boys" amongst our regular clients :) and that's a good thing.