Tell us a bit about yourself.

I was born in Poland and I've spent almost my whole life there so far. I was always interested in computers and I got my first one very early. It was an Acorn machine that was able to display four colours at once and could store a few dozen games on one 720KB floppy (yes it had a 3.5 floppy drive!). Some time later I got an Amiga 500 and then I started my adventure with 3D from normal stuff like mirror balls on chessboard etc.

Apart from 3D, my other passion is photography. I have tons of colour slides from different parts of the world and another huge pile of shots of my son :-). Photography helps me to see the world from new perspectives and create better, more realistic 3D.

Since January 2003 I live in Sydney. I work for a small medical company doing medical animations. It's not quite what I want to do so I'm going to move on soon.

When did you see LightWave for the first time and start using it?

It is hard to say when exactly, but it was about 10 years ago. I had been using 3D Studio for DOS at that time and one of my friends recommended LightWave. I was quite happy with 3D Studio but I decided to give it a try. After that I never used 3D Studio again.

At that time Poland was still a communist regime, so I could have any software for free legally. There was no law to protect software from piracy. I think the version I started with was version 4.x but I don't remember correctly.

What do you like about the package?

It is difficult to say what I like about it because I use it for such a long period of time that it is just a part of my life. I think modelling is the best part of LightWave, especially with some 3rd party plug-ins. It's a real pleasure.

What could be improved for you?

This might be a long list :-). First of all, I would like to see all bugs fixed. The most annoying bug for me is disappearing objects with clip-maps applied that makes clip-maps useless. I would like to have multiple undo in layout and even better would be a history stack that would improve workflow significantly. I think the architecture is a bit old now and should be changed. I have couple of ideas for plug-ins but I cannot implement them for LightWave because of its inflexible architecture.

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

I use a Toshiba laptop mainly for development. It is a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM. It is enough for development and it is very good to have a portable 'work environment'. I also have a PC for animation projects. It is an Athlon 2400+ with 1GB of RAM.