Tell us a bit about yourself.

I work from my home-based studio, just Northwest of London. I started out creating hand drawn 2D graphics for Amiga games, but everything after that has been 100% LightWave. After a short stint at video-editing and special FX, I soon got into Shockwave and Flash 2D web programming, ultimately working for a large advertising agency in central London. My Ericsson T20 game won the 2001 Advertising Clio Statue. After this I took a year out to create my little GameBombs. A series of three kids CD-ROMs each in their own cool plastic bombPod which eventually made it to the UK shelves Xmas 2002.

With the advent of Director 8.5 and Shockwave 3D my dream came true (Shockwave web content with full access to Direct3D and OpenGL without all the hideous complexity of C++ compilers and APIs). When Newtek brought out the best Shockwave3D exporter for any package (including weight mapped bones!!!) I couldn't believe my luck.

I dived head first into the 3D web game scene and got a lucky break with Hurtle Turtle on www.shockwave.com. From there I did quite a few 3D commissions and ad-based web games, plus a few projects for the super cool Swiss firm. Also rapid prototyping for UK based peripheral firm In2Games. My latest 2D work "Rescue Blade" is a retro game with pre-rendered graphics. A real old style sprite based effort, but still great fun. Dunk cableGuy for a surprise!

My latest 3D title is BattleX for Mattel.
http://www.shockwave.com/sw/content/battlex

I loosened my strict polygon limit to enable precision looking vehicles to better match the toys. I am particularly proud of the weapon chain rack. Lightwave’s excellent UV mapping enabled very efficient use of the limited texture allowance for this title.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

I was introduced to LightWave thanks to my mentor Gary Fenton, who had it running it on his good old Commodore Amiga (sigh...)

When did you first start using it?

I first used it on the PC for MTV music video visuals around '95. It has a steep learning curve, but it's well worth it in the long run. I create the real-time models, textures, sound effects, silly voices, code, physics and music myself, so I'm very self-contained. I think working as a one-man band avoids a lot of the communication problems I've encountered when part of a large freelance team in an office environment.

What do you like about the package?

The high-contrast environment for a start and Modeller feels very low level. You can really get stuck in up to your elbows with the poly/vertex level editing. Much better than other packages I've used. The modelling tools are unbeatable for hand-building real-time low-poly content. Also it has an amazing feature set for the price tag.