When did you see LightWave for the first time?

I started in the film business as a practical effects guy. I was looking for a new studio around 1991 or so. Through a friend, I found a place from a model maker that was giving up his studio to move completely into CGI. I only had a passing knowledge of CGI at that time so I didn't pay much attention. However, he took me into his office to show me "the future of models". There was an Amiga computer with a spaceship on the screen sitting on his desk. I thought it looked pretty cool, but since I was in the creature/make-up effects area, it didn't make that much of an impression. He told me that models were finished in the film business, that everything would be done on the computer soon, and I had better take a hard look at using the computer for creatures too.

The model maker's name was Ron Thornton. Later I found out he had just shown me the very first tests for "Babylon 5".

When did you first start using it?

A year or so later I was about to leave on location for a movie. Basically, when you go on location, you generally spend a lot of time in bars, or spend a lot of time in your hotel room. This time I decided to do something productive with myself. So before I left on this movie, I picked up an Amiga 2000. I didn't have the faintest idea of what I was doing, but by the time I came back to Los Angeles, I had become completely hooked on CG.

I worked on a few projects in my old profession while I trained myself to "make the switch" to digital. Fortunately, because of my background, I was able to find work pretty quickly. The first digital job I did was the ending to "Prophecy". Mike Hoover and I made a few shots using LightWave and Elastic Reality with Amigas and Dec Alphas.

What do you like about the package?

The renderer. Even though some of the other packages have begun to catch up in recent years, LightWave still has one of the best rendering engines in the business. I frankly don't care what has to be done in a software package. The most important thing is what comes out Also, Modeler is still the best polygonal modeller around.

What could be improved for you?

We would like better tools out of the box Better physics and hard body dynamics are good examples. I know there are 3^rd party plug-ins that add this functionality, but I believe this is something that the base package should offer.

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

We have become a rather large house now. There are approximately 50 workstations at the moment. Our animators work on dual 2.4ghz P4s w/ 2 gigs of ram.

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

There are many, many plug-ins we use. Many of the Japanese plug-ins are great like psyco+graph's and we use a lot of Eki's plug-ins too.

I take it that you are not Bulgarian in origin. Do you have any links with the country?

I came to Bulgaria to VFX supervise a movie. I fell in love with the country and the rest is history. I saw an opportunity here and realized that starting a CGI house in Bulgaria was risky but not insane. Of course, not everybody agreed with me. Most of my friends and family thought I was certifiably insane. But two years later we have done the effects for more than 20 movies, and now some of the projects coming in are higher profile films.