Tell us a bit about yourself

I am visual effects supervisor at Zoïc Studios in California, currently working on the Firefly Movie, "Serenity". I started my career back at Foundation Imaging working on Star Trek Voyager after graduating from the University of California at San Diego.

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

The first time I saw it was while I was in College at an NAB show in Vegas. I had played around with Electric Image a little bit, but this program looked so intuitive!

When did you first start using it?

I started using it back in school as well. I bought a copy as soon as the educational price came out on it.

What do you like about the package?

The things I like the most are the renderer, which is amazing, it is very hard to get that level of quality out of anything else without a team of programmers, and the camera. It is the easiest camera to create realistic camera moves with hands down. You don't have to create cumbersome rigs or any of that nonsense. You can just shoot with it like you were using a real camera. That is huge for a lot of the work I have been doing as of late.

The handheld style of work that was the signature of Galactica was easy to produce in LightWave then? Just how was the "faulty" tracking, focussing and zooming achieved in a realistic manner?

The hand-held look was much easier to produce in LightWave 3D as opposed to any other software primarily because you can control it like a real camera in real time. You can look through the lens and follow the action, catch another piece of action then follow it, etc, very easily. As opposed to having to work with constraints and not being able to easily follow an object using the interface as a viewfinder without having to select multiple tools to try and accomplish that like you would in many other 3D packages. As for the "faulty" tracking, (and by that I mean hand held feel,) it was really just a matter of finesse and using all the info we accumulated during the actual filming of the shot to make them as painless as possible, and some were painful. We had to warp images in 2D lots of times to get all the edges to line up, etc.

What could be improved for you?

The motion blur in LightWave 3D could be better. Other renderers have caught up to it in that area. Getting rid of the banding that you see on fast shots would be great.

What spec machines are you using it on at the moment?

Dual 2.2GHz Xeons with 2GB of ram, Quadro 750XGL graphics cards and Windows 2000.

2.2GHz Xeons seem a little slow? Why haven't you got the latest speed machines?

You're right they are, and we are soon due for some desktop upgrades! We have a 700 processor render farm though, ranging from 2.2-3GHz Pentiums. We currently use Butterfly Net Render to control the farm.