Tell us a bit about yourself

We had just finished public primary and lower secondary school when we began developing an idea about a self-employed future, but it wasn't until after high school that this idea could be brought to life. While we were at high school, we got introduced to the Amiga scene - we were already huge Amiga fanatics and shortly after VEF was a demo group. We participated with our first short film in 1996 at The Party (the biggest computer-party in the Nordic countries). When high school was over, we went straight ahead and founded VEF as a company, although we wish now that we could have had some knowledge about CGI before doing so. But back then everything about computers, especially in Denmark, was limited and any related education was out of the question unless we were willing to move to UK or the states. Even getting jobs was difficult so we decided to do some website development as well. It wasn't until two years ago that we finally could focus solely on 3D computer graphics. Our patience paid off, and we are now dedicated completely to 3D CGI - mainly for broadcast productions.

Who is "we"? I guess you'd better tell me the team at VEF before we start! :)

We are Ole Samsøe (Owner and co-founder of VEF) and Zafar Iqbal (Creative 3D artist).

When did you first start using it?

We saw the light when we were browsing through Amiga magazines back in 1995. One day we read something about Video Toaster/LightWave 3D and Babylon 5. We were totally fascinated and wanted to have one right away. But as students we were forced to wait. Fortunately the wait wasn't long as LW got released as a standalone application. We have now been using it since v3.5.

What do you like about the package?

LightWave is very intuitive and easygoing program. Within the first week we were able to do basic animation, surfacing and modelling! It was a big deal for us, as our background came from Real 3D v1.3, where you had to inverse animate to fix or undo glitches ;).

Every time we need to get into new areas, its only a matter of short amount of time, and you are there. The surface editor is simple but yet flexible enough to allow you to do advanced surfacing. The Modeler is undoubtedly the best there is. Everything is where you want them to be, and keyboard shortcuts! As Amiga old-timers we LOVE keyboard shortcuts.

It's amazing that many of the advanced renders (and modelling) that are being done today, no matter what the application, could be (and were) done in LightWave several years ago.

The strongest side of LightWave is its many simple features instead of having advanced ones. The Modeler is a proof of that. It's based on primarily simple features, but yet lets the high-end competition fall way behind.

We see LightWave as a universal application which is flexible enough to let us get the job done and the great community is also worth mentioning.

What could be improved for you?

General speed improvement, especially regarding character animation. Although LightWave [8] will feature improvements for rigging, we would still like to see more attention paid to this area.

We would love to see LightWave take a step closer to high-end productions, which could be accomplished a lot by focusing on better channel and 16bpc import/export. Adopting OpenEXR would be appreciated.

The current subdivision surface method Modeler uses is getting outdated. We should be able to work with polygons with more than four sides in Sub-D mode as well as being able to control edges without the need of segments to harden the bend.

Motionmixer is a great feature, but it has many lacks. It should be fully integrated and more flexible. We used it a lot in our Saturday music video, and were forced to work in odd ways just to allow multiple characters to use the same animations.

We would also like to see improvements to the render engine. Anti-aliasing and motion blurring are falling behind the competition. Alternatively, NewTek should allow third-party render engines.