For you, what is the best tool in LightWave?

Loïc: The Metanurb!

Aurélien: The modeller.

What could be improved for you?

Aurélien: Animation… undos in Layout! Fewer crashes with Hub and the graph editor.

Loïc: You could ask for lots of things, but for me, it doesn't lack much.

For Modeler:

A useful UV editor that takes account of Metanurbs, with the same kind of tools that are available in Modeler (Symmetry, rotation of faces and so on).
Being able to place textures more easily (the "Texture Guide" is a bit underpowered…)

For Layout:

Undo/Redo to infinity or at least a history.
The ability to select all items at the same time (objects, lights, bones, camera…) so that you can edit their keys.
A new keyframe editor that is simpler, faster and more efficient than the graph editor.
The ability to animate locally to avoid gimbal lock.
An IK system that is less buggy for setting up an arm, for instance.
A bone setup editor. For example, we set up a rig and animate it and realise than we want to split a bone in two. It would be good if we could return to this setup editor to make the changes and return to Layout to find that the animation is still there (a bit like Messiah).
Update Motion Designer (so that it's faster).

Less important:

Being able to memorise the rotational and motion set-up of a hierarchy of items (i.e. You could memorise different poses of a hand so that you could "morph" it from one to another. A bit like Motion Mixer but less bulky, less buggy and more open to the rest of the program (Follower doesn't work with Motion Mixer).
Improve OpenGL to implement newer functions like real-time shadows and making sure that Previews take account of these things.
With Hypervoxels, it would be good to be able to regulate the attraction between particles without adjusting their diameter. Also, if a particle is a long way from other particles it should be smaller (like RealFlow).
More options for particles!

I really like the fact that you said "There's nothing much to change about LightWave" and you proceed on to list 13 things that can be done to improve it! That made me laugh :)

Loïc: Yeah, you're right… :) The trouble is that I made the mistake of asking my colleagues if they had any requests and I ended up with a huge list! Of course, there are always lots of little things that can be improved in LightWave.

But for me, and I use it for all stages of creation (modelling, texturing, animation and rendering), I don't think it lacks much. A keyframe editor here, and good UV/texture map editor there, undo/redo…

What sort of computer are you working on at the moment?

Aurélien: Athlon 1800+ with a GeForce 2 GTS Pro.

Loïc: At home:
An Amiga 1200 with 10MB RAM and a 2GB hard disk;
A desktop PC: Pentium III at 600 MHz with 256 MB RAM;
A PC laptop: Pentium 4 at 2 GHz with 512 MB RAM.

At work:
Several dual processor PIIIs and P4s and some AMD machines with 1GB RAM.