How old are you?

I'm 29

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

It was around 1998, a friend was showing me LightWave 5.5 and the results made with it. I was kind of impressed but a little bit afraid of the interface.

When did you first start using it?

This was around 1998 or 1999, I'm not sure about this. Another friend taught me the first steps with LightWave, we modelled a gravis gamepad and so I got familiar with the interface and philosophy of LightWave.

Is the Gravis gamepad the one you use in your tutorial on texturing an object?

No, that's an 'Interact' pad that I bought for my VAIO to play Neo-Geo games. There was a sunny day and the light and the room around the pad was great and I wanted to capture this moment with LightWave. So I wrote this tutorial ;-)

What do you like about the package?

I like the speed. It doesn't matter what you want to do, you will get nice looking results within a short time. The LightWave renderer always produces stunning renders with very little effort, especially when using area lights, backdrop radiosity and other nice ways to create realistic-looking pictures.

What could be improved for you?

Okay, the other side of the coin to the speed of LightWave is the tweaking of its results. Sometimes it is hard to change things as you'd like. Working with surfaces particularly, you often require some kind of parameter linking. For me as a modeller it is also very important that changes like object position and pivot points are better handled by Layout. I want more control over scene and object management.

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

I'm working with several machines. The main system is my good old dual p3/1 GHz with 1 GB memory, SCSI RAID system and a GeForce 3. I also have a dual Celeron 533 MHz/768 MB as a render node or for modelling. For small projects out of the office I use a Sony VAIO c1ve (picturebook), LightWave runs fine because of the ATI Rage mobility graphic adapter and it is enough for real-time projects.