Tell us a bit about yourself.

After completing a fine art degree in Sheffield and spending some time working in a camera shop, I moved to London and worked as a technical assistant in Sherbet Productions. I then moved up to Technical Manager and got opportunities to animate and composite on Monkey Dust, Girls in Love and Kotex and Persil ads. From then I decided to go freelance, but I still return to Sherbet to do more Monkey Dust, and any other projects they may need me on.

When did you see LightWave 3D for the first time?

About four years ago at Sherbet I started using it casually for simple backgrounds etc. Then I worked on a short pilot called Mr Macaroni, taking over where another 3D artist, my good friend Adam Sharp, left off. A combination of the manual, picking through Adam's files and some late nights and I got a good grip on the program.

When did you first start using it?

The first commercial job I used LightWave for was Monkey Dust series 2. I worked with the director Tim Sagar, combining 3D backgrounds and props with his 2D animation. He has a great flat cartoon style, and I found LightWave perfect to blend the 3D and 2D together. A combination of edges, cel-shading, some textures and clip maps made this pretty simple.

What do you like about the package?

I love Modeler - it's so fast and tactile. It's the most artist-friendly and expressive of all the 3D modellers out there. The new dynamics are great, and area lights are simply beautiful. It's a reasonably priced, complete package. There is nothing that beats it.

What could be improved for you?

There are still some bugs in 8.2 for me, namely instability with motion mixer and geometry problems with the mirror tool in Modeler.

I would like to see the animation side of LightWave get better. A new, simpler animation interface and more control of points and polygons for deformations on the fly. Sometimes I think Newtek should put in some of the great 3rd party plug-ins as standard, and then put up the price.

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

Pentium 4 2.2ghz self-build, 1 gig Ram, SCSI HD

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

I think for most LightWave users FPrime is a real breakthrough, it's just superb. If this was built into LightWave it would clean the floor with the opposition.