Tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm 31 and work as a freelance visualiser/illustrator/animator from home in Norfolk which I've been doing for about five years now. Although I had trained as a technical illustrator at college airbrushing of cutaway engines and suchlike, and enjoyed it immensely, when I returned to Norfolk I could find no work whatsoever! We had dabbled with the Macs at college and I've always been into computers, so I managed to get a job at a printers doing DTP - Quark XPress, and little bits of Photoshop and Illustrator work. During this time a friend of mine had bought Ray Dream Designer and when I saw it I instantly thought that this would be the best of both worlds, doing realistic illustration using a computer - perfect! So, with absolutely no contacts, or experience in 3D packages, I finished my job, bought a cheapish Windows 98 PC, and started hunting for a 3D program.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

When I was at a Mac Expo, maybe 1997. I have a feeling it was Andy Bishop from Darkside Animation demoing it on a stand there. I remember looking at what it could do and being blown away by it.

Why did you choose LightWave?

I actually chose Inspire first. My reasons were firstly, and most importantly that it had LightWave's renderer which was the best I'd seen in the low/mid price range.

Secondly, I could upgrade to a higher end program (full LightWave) as I progressed, without having to learn a new program.

Also, LightWave's history and pedigree meant that it was industry-proven which carried a lot of weight with me, as there were several other 3D programs around at Inspire's price which claimed to do things as well but were new on the block.

When did you make the switch from Inspire?

I bought Inspire in 1998 which got me under way with the basics, and upgraded to full LightWave 6 when I started needing higher-end features.

What do you like about the package?

My favourite bits of the program would be the great rendering, and the modelling which with the tools and great shortcut keys can be extremely fast for many tasks.

Mainly though, that it does a very good job of everything I need to do. Other programs seem to rely heavily on expensive plug-ins for extra effects but LightWave is very capable out of the box. On the other hand though, LightWave's plug-in nature is a great advantage. If I need to do something which LightWave can't do, there are hundreds of great plug-ins, many of which are free, that can probably do what I want.