Tell us a bit about yourself

I'm a huge fan of anime, games, and movies. My life actually seems to revolve around those things. Back when I was a little kid, I loved doodling because we were a military family that had to move around all the time and I'd lose all my friends every time we moved, so I'd end up doodling to fill up the amount of time it took for me to find new ones in the new state(s). At the end of high school, my friend and I found a demo of TrueSpace 2.0 (through another friend of mine's virtual reality book) and we BOTH totally freaked out over the fact that we could actually make CG with our home computers! See, we thought you needed to have a supercomputer farm in order to do any CG, so we'd never thought about it before. If you took a look at the ridiculously old CAD program and the computers it was run on back in our high school, you'd totally understand why we thought it was impossible to make 3D on home computers.

About six months after I'd started toying around with TrueSpace 2, I actually lucked out and got a job at Ion Storm, and I've been working in the game industry ever since. :)

Can I ask about your name, if you don't mind? Seneca was a roman writer of some repute, so how did you get the name? Obviously, your parents named you when you were a baby, but are you related to the Roman writer? :)

Hahahah. There have been about ten big things in history that have had the Seneca name that I know of, and how my mother chose this name had nothing to do with them. Of all the places I would have thought she'd found this name, I never would have guessed that it was actually a soap opera character's name! I'm so happy she chose it, though. It's so unique. If I ever hear the word "Seneca", I know for sure they're talking to me. Well, except for the one time where a store manager asked me to come behind the counter so he could show me something and I freaked him out and he freaked me out because I didn't know how he knew my name. That's ended up being the only time in my entire life where I've actually met another Seneca. :)

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

As soon as both my friend and I got hired at Ion Storm (yes! We both actually got hired!) we were forced to use LightWave. What's really funny about that is that we had only known TrueSpace before we came to Ion Storm. We hadn't even heard of Photoshop or 3ds max or LightWave or anything! So when the lead artist said that we just had to use LightWave, I was actually complaining! Of course, just speed forward in time by about one week, and I was a totally different person, so don't hold that against me.

What could be improved for you?

1) Frames Per Second. We have to model things that go from 30K-1.5 million polygons for our game, and when I'm working on a huge model, LightWave slows down to a crawl, so that every one of the monster's limbs has to be in different layers so I can work on them. If you load up 3D model viewers that are truly using my video card to render, I can actually show a whole 1 million polygon character on screen, and it will not slow down :)

2) UV editing. There are a number of UV features that LightWave really needs improvements on in my opinion. The fact that UVs have to be unwelded causes damage all over the place.

Then there's the true UV-smoothing that you're supposed to get if you Metanurb a model that's had its UVs laid out. All the hard edges on the Metanurbed model will get their textures stretched severely.

Relax UVs. This is a feature that I use all the time in some other program - but then again, that's the only thing I use in that entire program.

3) Model placement/prefabs. We have to make lots of mechanical models and textures, so it'd be very nice if I could save out a ton of prefabs and just click a button to have a little window pop up with icons for them all that I can then start painting that prefab on to what I'm working on. This would be really good for painting on rivets, or throwing on extra tech decoration, or if you had to make a ruined building and needed to place rocks/boulders/etc. all over the place. I also wish it was easy to take a bunch of prefabs and just float them over the area I needed to fill, and then just have physics drop them all onto the ground so I don't have to place them manually.