Tell me a bit about yourself

I discovered 3D abut ten years ago. At the time I was still at secondary school and it was just a hobby, but I quickly realised it was what I wanted to do for a living. After having done a year of an architecture course, I decided to enrol at Supinfocom (a major French animation school) so that I could learn about the big 3D packages of the day that ran on SGI machines. But that was at the end of an era, and soon afterwards everything was ported to Windows machines and they made me use 3dsmax... so I stayed with LightWave. Xavier Henry (Yann's partner on the Akryls project) found himself in the same boat as me and we decided to make Akryls in LightWave, which was a good choice. After that I was a lighting artist at Duran (a well-known Parisian effects house) for a year working on Immortel Ad Vitam, one of the first films to use virtual sets, before working on "Peril on Akryls" for Futuroscope with Xavier Henry at Cube.

How did you discover LightWave?

It was at a time when I was playing with 3D Studio under DOS and a friend showed me LightWave 3D 4. The render quality seduced me immediately and I started to learn the program.

When did you begin to use it seriously?

I think it was in 1997, when 5.5 came out. I bought a licence and buckled down to use it.

What's your favourite part of LightWave?

The render engine... it allows you to get absolutely beautiful images with very little rendertime. Its pass-based anti-aliasing system means that you can get a whole range of effects with a bit of trickery, such as using motion blur for shadows to simulate area lights.

On the other hand, if you use nothing but area lights to light your scene, you can end up with very long render times.

These are old techniques from early versions of LightWave that are still useful today and which are sadly underused.

In using the pass system with these tricks (which allow for effects from blurred refraction like an area light would, through to cloud or similar effects, without bumping up render times), you can get a fast final render, even in heavy scenes with excellent 3D motion blur.

What's the best tool in LightWave for you?

The 3D motion blur that allows you to obtain lots of render effects without increasing render time (soft shadows, blurred reflection and refraction, fog and so on), and the 192-bit output from LightWave which gives a fantastic image for compositing.

As far as you are concerned, what could be improved in LightWave?

Improve LightWave's architecture, constructing a solid base for future development and making the SDK as open as possible. I would like to see an improvement in memory handling for render buffers and large textures and making the multithreading more prevalent throughout the program (especially for the calculation of shadow maps) - this last is becoming more essential as multiple core processors are becoming more available.