When did you see LightWave for the first time?

The very first time that I ever saw LightWave was in a computer magazine - they were doing an article on special effects that were made for television-series. Since a lot was created with LightWave, the magazine also did an overview of the software. I think that was almost eight years ago.

When did you first start using it?

LightWave isn't the first 3D software that I used. For a school project (I was studying "Reclametekenen" at SITO in 1995 and 1996 where I learned a lot about design) I used Autodesk 3D Studio v3 to make a walk-through of the school building. It wasn't until 1997, when I started studying animation at the Rits film school in Brussels that I learned how to use LightWave and it became my number one 3D software package. The first version I used was LightWave 4.0 running on an Amiga. Although the look of the program then was very monotone, I found it easier to use and more advanced (especially the Modeler) than Autodesk 3D Studio.

What do you like about the package?

There are a lot of things that makes LightWave one of the most user-friendly 3D programs. First of all I like the look and feel of the program, the buttons are mostly self-explanatory and are easy to access. Speed is one of the most important things when you are making a project that has a deadline. Using these easy-to-access buttons together with shortcuts makes the whole work process very fast.

I also like the separation of Modeler and Layout. Making the objects in one part of the program and animating it in another makes me more organised. I never use the HUB - I still save and load everything manually when I want to transfer an object from Modeler to Layout. Maybe it's because I'm used to saving and loading everything manually.

What could be improved for you?

I have never used LW 7.0 or 7.5. The version I used for FLUEX was LW 6.5. So I bet a lot of things were improved in the new versions. The only thing that I really missed during the making of FLUEX was a decent and easy to use character-setup utility. Everything in FLUEX was animated using Forward Kinematics because I just couldn't get the Inverse Kinematics to work like I wanted them to.

There are always some things that could be improved like rendering-times (especially when using Hypervoxels or volumetric lighting), multiple Undo in Layout or Frame Ticks. The strange thing about the Frame Ticks is that they were available in LW 4.0 but when LW 5.x and 6.x were released the Frame Ticks were missing.

But overall I could make and animate everything that I wanted using LightWave.

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

I made FLUEX using a Pentium III 866 MHz with 256 Mb DDR-RAM and 40 Gb of hard disk. The Videocard was a Geforce 2 MX with 32 Mb. When the final rendering started I used friends' PCs and it took about two weeks to render everything on the three computers.

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

I didn't really use any plug-ins, LightWave itself has all the tools that I could ask for. The only plug-in I used was Vertex Paint, and if I'm not mistaken that plug-in is now built into LightWave 7. And I can understand why - Vertex Paint is one great plug-in, it makes weightmapping easy and fast.