What are you working on now?

I've always got several jobs happening at once, and of course doing the work I do its usually confidential, but a non-secret project I'm doing at the moment is some animation of commercial washroom décor for a large company in the midlands. I had been doing some line illustration work for them for two years, and when I heard that they wanted to do a video of their product to show how it's put together, I immediately thought that 3D animation would do a faster, cleaner job. I spent two or three days doing some speculative animation of their product and when I went to show them they were very impressed with the idea, and decided to drop the video work completely! So now I am doing several animations which will go onto a Sales CD-ROM. What constantly gives me a real buzz is how excited the designers are when they see their own product or design animated on screen, and it really does make my work very enjoyable!

Do you do much animation, or is it mainly exploded diagrams and product design?

The majority of my work is stills although I'm starting to do more animation work. I have done many animations to sell children's mealboxes which unfortunately I can't show, but three other recent animations are a flythrough of the heart and veins, some work on an internal presentation of the new Jaffa Cake packaging, and also a CD for Vauxhall of their new AFL headlight system.

Does your work have to be physically accurate?

I do work as accurately as possible in LightWave although I guess not to the degree of a CAD program. My work is usually used for presentation or marketing so as long as it looks right, it is right as my college lecturer used to say!

What sort of industries are your main customers in?

I've done a variety of work, but mostly a mixture of packaging and product design. I always enjoy working on new types of project though, as its always interesting, and adds more 'strings to my bow'.

How did you get the breaking bow wave and wake on your Research vessel animation?

The wake was just done with texture maps from Photoshop along with animated fractal noise, and the slight spray was hypervoxels spraying up from beneath the main surface.

What was it for?

It started out as a possible commercial job, but didn't happen in the end. But I thought though that it was a good personal project to do ready for possible future maritime jobs.

Are you interested in film effects work?

If the chance came along I'd certainly do it because I like to get my teeth into as many different types of project as possible, and also because of the kudos with clients! But purely from a personal point of view, its not something that I feel I need to do. There are many other fields I've done work in which 3D and LightWave is perfect for, and although they might not have the glitzy punch that a film credit may have, they can still impress people, be enjoyable to do, and don't need a huge team of people to contribute. From my own point of view, there are so many magazine reviews of how a blockbuster film was done with 200 people, writing their own ocean wave plug-ins, and very high end compositing software - which isn't really that relevant to me. Its great to read articles about how, say, a freelancer got through a visualisation or architectural job, what the brief was, and the issues that arose (particularly if they were using LightWave of course!).

In your Design Council illustrations, was texturing purely a matter of testing position, rendering, tweaking, repeat? :)

I modelled the objects with very basic geometry and then added the text (which I'd received as Illustrator files) as clip maps. The trickier bits were the more rounded objects such as the rucksack, which involved creating each main surface as flat, adding the text clip map, and then using an endomorph to form the right shape.

Were your washroom illustrations completely done in LightWave with a celshader or similar?

These were actually done in Adobe Illustrator. Having said that, I did use LightWave to model and render some components in LightWave for and traced over them in Illustrator, which was much faster than trying to draw them from scratch in Illustrator.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Alex! If you're interested in seeing more of Alex's work, visit his website.