My first question for you is a real toughie. How come you're in England? Isn't the weather nice enough for you in Rome?

Hahahaha!:) The weather in Italy is perfect!

I really miss the sun... well, actually, I miss my girlfriend most of all! ;)

Unfortunately, Italy doesn't offer many chances to a game developer, either for artists or programmers. There're some good developers and some of them are quite famous, but I'm really talking small numbers here!

England is one of the best countries in Europe for games development. There are so many companies and experienced people and lots of opportunities. I hope that one day Italy will have a huge boost in the games industry as well.

When did you first start using LightWave?

The first time I saw it was on Amiga... LightWave 4.0 running on an Amiga 3000. But I already heard of LightWave as a 3D suite for VideoToaster before that time.

I think it was around 1995/96 when I was first experimenting with Imagine 2.0/3.0 and Real3D.

I started using it with my friends at Dreamlike Visions, when we were crazy about all that sci-fi stuff. So we made together the "Avalon", a concept for a space ship where details were something amazing for that times, considering we were using Pentium Pro 200Mhz processors.

At the same time I had the boost of my life helping Massimo at Lumenumbra testing his shaders for LightWave and working for Digitrace on a multimedia CD, my very first commercial product.

I’ve now been using it professionally since 1997 - almost six years.

What do you like about the package?

I'm very much in love with LightWave's rendering engine, as most people are. It has a quite fast and flexible built-in radiosity engine and its native support of HDR and 128-bit rendering pipeline make it unique.

Viper is a must for very fast previews and HyperVoxels let me create stunning particle effects on the fly. Also I think animation has been improved drastically compared to previous versions. Layout has some great tools such as Motion Mixer for non-linear animation and the all-in-one Spreadsheet makes your life so much easier!

Using Modeler is a pleasure, especially when you have to intensively deal with UVMaps, as it happens with realtime graphics. Its mapping and snapping tools are something no-one should miss.

I very much like the whole package, including the custom scripting language LScript. At the moment I don't know any another 3D package that has a built in debugger! Fantastic!

What could be improved for you?

Mmm... maybe a bit more integration between Modeler and Layout.

I very much like the fact that they are two different applications, because it has its strong benefits, but I'd like more data to be shared between Modeler and Layout... a construction history maybe?

What spec machine(s) do you use it on at the moment?

I use LightWave on an AMD Athlon 1.4 Ghz, 1Gb Ram and an Elsa Gloria DCC.

What role do you play at Revolution?

I researched the style and visual techniques for Broken Sword 3 from the very beginning, and I chose LightWave to achieve the actual look of the backgrounds.

What else have you worked on?

Before I came to Revolution, I worked on Tsunami 2265 (PC) for which I created backgrounds, concept design, animations, realtime cut-scenes, and implementation using a custom scripting language. I also used LightWave for the intro sequence and to render the graphics used for the package.

When I first came to Revolution, "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (Playstation2) to which I contributed some background work.

And then of course a lot of R&D for Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon before starting creating the backgrounds.

Why are you using LightWave for the backgrounds? The previous Broken Sword games were all 2D weren’t they?

At the very beginning of the project I was asked to try to achieve a particular look for Broken Sword 3 backgrounds that had to resemble the 2D look of previous Broken Sword chapters.

The first thing I wanted for the backgrounds was a rich lighting.
Usually lighting in games means "vertex illumination". You can obviously achieve pretty good results with that method but it usually results in a "flat" background, with no cast shadows and no overbrightening effect.

Since we wanted highly contrasted and very shadowy backgrounds, lightmaps were a good solution.

I tried many packages but LightWave was the perfect tool to achieve our goal.