Tell us a bit about Luma Studios and yourself.

Hi there!. Well, my name is Nigel Schutte, I'm 25 years old and live in South Africa. I'm self taught (aren't we all?) and have been doing 3D for five years. I'm a Cancerian, have brown eyes and enjoy long walks on the beach... uh, sorry, wrong interview :)

Luma Animation Studios was founded by three animators with a passion for character animation in 2001. The LightWave team consists of myself and two colleagues, Brendon Goosen and Robert Abrie. I myself only joined them in 2005 when I got a rather unexpected e-mail from the company director, inviting me to visit the studio after seeing some of my work on the Spinquad forums. I ended up staying.

How many people work for Luma altogether?

Luma Animation has 11 animators, 1 sculptor, a programmer and two producers. Luma Design is a team of four, which use LightWave on several of their projects.

Tell me about Luma's logo?

Our logo was designed by Gerhard Painter of Luma Design. Basically, the icon is a visual representation of three ideas. 1. Vision (Eye) - To create beautiful content. 2. Growth (Flower) - To keep pushing the boundaries and 3. Light (Luma) - All visual things are presented to us through light, without it, we can not create.

I've made it a small requirement on each project I work on to hide our logo somewhere, and have been quite successful. It's either hidden in a texture, or integrated into the scene as a model. Animators' names and special dates also make their way into our projects.

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

I was first introduced to LightWave in 2000, I saw a demonstration of it on some computer/technology show on TV and I started using LightWave 6 in 2001.

What do you like about the package?

The simplicity of it all is what really got me hooked. If you know what you want, LightWave can do it quickly and easily with minimal fuss. Also, its ability to impress users of other packages with features we often take for granted.

Which features in particular?

Realtime OpenGL displacements are always a crowd pleaser - I can't imagine having to do F9 renders just to set up my displacements. Our ability to preview motion blur and depth of field in OpenGL is also a great feature worth showing off, if only it wasn't limited to a single frame preview.

What could be improved for you?

Personally, I think the animation toolset could be enhanced.
While I really like Modeler and Layout being separate, I would really like to have some tools to edit models in Layout. Being able to manipulate and animate vertices, animate extrusions and paint weight maps would be invaluable.

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

I have an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with 2GB of RAM. We also have a render farm that the LightWave team use almost exclusively.

Do you use the 64-bit version of LW, or the 32-bit one?

Currently we all use the 32-bit LightWave. Only one of us in the LightWave team has a 64-bit machine, and the transition was not such a smooth one, a lack of drivers and hardware made it rather impractical at the time. We will however look into it in the near future.

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

FPrime! We use it on every project. That beast is revolutionary. We use radiosity because we CAN, not because we must :)