Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Roger Harris and I am a freelance illustrator based in the South East of the UK. I did a commercial illustration course at college in the days before computers, working on perspective grids on a drawing board (Yuk!). I then worked at a number of places, ending up in London producing 2D presentation slides on Dicomed systems (anyone remember the IMaginator!). After I got fed up with commuting and London hours I came back to work in my home town and vowed never to go back to London again (at least not for work). I worked in a radio communications company art department and introduced them to the wonder of the Apple Mac. While there I knew I wanted to get into 3D so I began to teach myself out of hours. I went fully freelance about 12 years ago.

I now work in most fields of the multimedia industry, including: simple Quark-type page layout, corporate artwork, websites, Flash, music production, animation etc. but mainly my work involves 3D illustration.

I have worked for many clients over the years, some of the biggies being: Paramount, Warner Brothers, Lego, Dorling Kindersley and many others. I have created artwork for children's books, product art, packaging, architectural visuals, product design, magazine cover art, book art etc. At the moment I am mainly involved with corporate commercial work for a large TV equipment company.

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

Blimey! That's a difficult one. I think it was version 3.5 but I can't remember that far back to be sure. I do remember that it had all the buttons in the style of the original Amiga version, but it was on a PC. My favorite version was 5.6 I seem to remember, it was just so stable and did exactly what it was supposed to without a hitch.

When did you first start using it?

Again, that was a long time ago. I used to use StrataVision 3D on a Mac quadra when I first started doing 3D work but I was frustrated by its lack of animation features and modelling ability, It didn't even do booleans, can you imagine the fun I had modelling products with that! When I took the plunge and bought a PC and started using LightWave it was a revelation. Back then the high-end packages like Alias just weren't available to common mortals like me - you needed a Silicon Graphics workstation to run them and a very big bank account. As far as I could see, LightWave was the best package available for my budget and once I started using it there was no looking back. From then on my work went from strength to strength and so did the software.

What do you like about the package?

I like the way that I can keep my modelling and rendering as separate disciplines. I like the way LW renders and I think its render signature is one of the best in the business. I don't do very much animation and so I like the way LW lets me use just the tools I need without anything else getting in the way. Over the years I have tried just about every other package out there but I always come back to LW because it just works!