Tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm 31 years old, was born in Washington DC, and have lived in England since I was two. My mum's Irish, so I've really got no idea what nationality I am. I'm an avid gamer, both current-gen stuff and old games on the C64 and Amiga. I like to travel, preferably with plenty of rock and electronica in the MP3 player, and my favoured tipple is Guinness. I live in reading with my long-suffering partner of nine years, and three Manx cats named Blert, Gouraud and Phong. I'm a big, big, big sci-fi fan, whether it's in print or TV and films. I'm loving New Galactica, and consider Serenity to be the best movie I've seen in years. I work for a variety of clients, from broadcast TV to doing sci-fi novel cover art. I've been freelance since 1996, and have had a great time working with such a slew of clients.

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

I was at Brunel University studying Physics. A friend I'd made through the drama group there (that's 3DBob on the Newtek forums) had it running on his Amiga. Must have been version 2.5 or something like that. I'd been using Imagine up to that point, courtesy of an Amiga Format coverdisk.

When did you first start using it?

That would be 1994. Whenever I could scrounge time on a machine with it installed! I started using it nearly-full-time in 1995. Long story short, the physics degree course didn't last long after I started watching Babylon 5, and realised that people were getting paid to build spaceships, and make them fight!

What do you like about the package?

It's really powerful. You can model pretty much any object you can imagine, and the default renderer is by far the prettiest out-of-the-box of all 3D software. The fact that it's all labelled in plain English, rather than having slews of icons and hieroglyphs to learn makes it a lot more approachable - something that's much appreciated when I'm teaching! (I've been giving tuition through places like Corps Business for the last five or six years). Also, the community and support is brilliant. NewTek keep dishing out free updates and bug-fixes, which has me quite spoiled when it comes to my expectations from other software companies!

What could be improved for you?

Integration, mainly. I'd love it if the various tools talked to one another a bit better, especially the character animation side of things. I'm also really looking forward to more advanced OpenGL in 9.0. I'd like some more powerful spline deformation tools in Layout, especially for the book recreation work!

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

My home boxes are both 3.2GHz Hyperthreading P4s, one of which is a laptop. One gig and half-a-gig of RAM respectively, and a GeForce FX5700 in the main box. Working for the British Library, the multimedia company I work with keep buying new machines each time - the last two additions to their render farm were a dual-CPU Mac G5, and a dual CPU Athlon 64. I'm pampered. ;)

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

FPrime, of course, is a revolution, I use some of the Pictrix tools for curve-conforming a lot in the British Library projects. We've started using Shadow Designer 2 a bit in the current set of books, which is giving us really nice results.

In your opinion, should LightWave 3D stay separated or become integrated?

I can see the benefits of both. In an ideal world, I'd like to have all of Modeler's tools keyframeable in Layout - that would be absolute hog heaven for me. By the same token, having a standalone modelling app means I can play around with meshes to my heart's content without having a scene overhead as well. I'd settle for tighter integration between the two.

How long have you been working on this project?

I think I did my first Turning the Pages project in about 2001.

Are there more books to come?

Oh, yes. I've just been working on a new one recently, and there's a second to complete before year's end.