Tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm 29 years old, and have been working at Passion Pictures for about 5 years now I think. I graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with a degree in product design when I was 21. I then worked for a new media company and freelanced around a bit before I landed at Passion.

What do you do at Passion?

Not much really, write interviews stuff like that. :-D My role has changed quite a lot. I do a lot of developing for projects and I generally handle the complex elements in projects. The title of Technical Director is a very generic one to be honest, and I guess my main tasks include Development, Character Rigging, Modeling, and FX work. Lucky me eh? :-)

Do you ever do the product design work you were trained for?

No, and I never want to. It was great at the start when I just did drawings of nice products, but as soon as it got into the technicalities of production I hated it. Just wasn’t my thing.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

I first saw LightWave back in the Amiga days. I used to try and use Real3D version 1.3 and Imagine, but soon became aware of LightWave when Ron Thornton used it to do the effects for Babylon 5. I started using LightWave 3.5 shortly after that. Those were the days. :-) I still don’t know how I did anything without OpenGL, subdivision surfaces, or a processor above 7mhz!

What do you like about the package?

LightWave has always seemed easy. Of course it has its complicated parts but even those are simple compared to a lot of the competition. This ease of use does come at a price when faced with complex shots but in general it allows the user to deliver high quality images in small time frames. Other applications have tried this approach but they rarely maintain the quality that LW has.

What could be improved for you?

There are lots of things that I would like to be improved in LightWave. The renderer really needs some work now to implement some of the more current solutions to antialiasing, shadow maps, shader creation, data structures, memory management, and displacements. I would also like to see the SDK/API improved. The animation changes in LW8 sound good but we use Messiah for animation so I’m a lot more interested in seeing render improvements.

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

At work I use a dual 3Ghz P4Xeon with 2 gig of ram, and at home I have the same except running at 2Ghz.

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

I would say Worley and Evasion make the most useable and stable plug-ins. They both seem to identify the need for a plug-in and their implementations are excellent. Other than those I don’t really use any plug-ins apart from which come with LW and ones I write myself. I guess you could say Messiah but that’s not really a plug-in is it?