Do you prefer modelling, texturing, animating or scripting?

I love all of it! I find scripting and rigging as creatively challenging as modelling, texturing, animating or lighting! However, if there's one I'd prefer over the others? I don't really know - sometimes it'll depend on the project, and whether the task is going to be one of those 'wish I didn't have to' jobs! lol!

How did you start scripting?

By typing it in... Haha! Actually, it all came from a need to write some quick tools for another animator in the studio. I used to code native plug-ins back in 5.5 days - I don't know how many people remember my 'Heads up Display' plug-in, or my Translucency shader I called 'Lampy'? They're on my website (with the original C source code) if anyone's interested in checking them out!

I figured, hey, I can't be bothered digging out my C compiler, I wonder if its time I actually played with LScript? So I did - And I love it! Its really easy to code tools in a hurry and you don't need extra software! In fact, when I needed a tool to analyse my web logs from the service provider I was using, I just wrote the tool in LScript cause it was just so easy to do! Crazy! My wife thought it was a little 'wacky' of me to write software that required a 3D application to work and always jokes that I'll probably write 'Office for LightWave' next! Of course, that's just silly - I was thinking maybe an accounting package...

Did your wife accompany you to Siggraph this year, or was she really a LightWave widow? :)

LOL! Yes, she came too, and she enjoyed it immensely - she's keen to return next year if we can afford it. This year we came as it was on our return home from a long vacation on the sunny coast of Croatia! Very warm, very beautiful landscape and plenty of photo opportunities for texture maps (of ancient stone walls, at least!)

You've got some lovely gifts for our readers. Tell me a bit about them?

The Lean Clean Scene Machine is a tool I developed originally to mass-clean out large amounts of duplicate spreadsheet and Full Scene Param Eval issues that had pretty much caused no end of technical hassles at the Studio where I've been working - these issues were not only a nuisance in LightWave, they were also 90% of the reason Screamernet nodes would crash!

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The original was a simple script - just select a scene file, an output filename and click OK. However, as time went on, I found out lots of other small problems... I thought to myself, "Hey, I could probably just write a cool plug-in that could take care of all kinds of issues I'd been running into in production", so I did! I originally released a version on my website that I said was a Beta version since I still had a tonne of features to add that I needed to look at... This version I've given you for readers to download not only has those extras added in, its also got a handful of LightWave 8-specific features included so it can process all the latest scenes as well as the older ones... Its what I call the 'Desktop TD tool'!

The other set of scripts for Modeler 8 also came from areas I felt would be 'better' if I could quickly fix or perform a task like, say, select a lot of points and weld them in pairs rather then the time-consuming 1-by-1 approach with LightWave's standard weld tool. So, while they're deceptively simple ideas, they have been used extensively by myself in making my workflow a lot quicker and less 'painful' in a real production environment... I hope they benefit your users as much as they have me personally!

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I'm sure the readers will be ecstatic! Thanks Kevin!

What are you working on now?

I've been working on some more TV commercials at the studio, and a few TV show pitch jobs... Unfortunately I can't reveal details due to confidentiality but I can say they are all done with LightWave!

Personally, I've recently hosted a presentation for LightWave at a Mac Expo. Promoting and demoing LightWave's hottest features was hard work when you have to decide which ones to leave out because of time limitations!

Thanks very much for taking time out to speak to us Kevin, You can check out more of Kevin's superb plug-ins at his site and remember, if you live in New Zealand, or are a native Kiwi, remember to go check out the Kiwavers user group!