What do you like about the package?

I find the modeller extremely powerful. Its intuition makes a huge difference to the scope of my work. I often experiment simply with growing fantastic shapes. These evolve into alien trees or unworldly buildings and often appear in my fantasy images.

Unfortunately I only used LightWave once for animation to create a bird of paradise drifting through a strange unworldly landscape for a video (I would love to do more animation). The whole program feels solid. The scene editor particularly presents limitless possibilities.

What could be improved for you?

I have used Bryce a lot in the past, but the mapping and rendering is limiting. I do like the fact that you can create a scene instantly, with a default infinite plane and a sky with clouds and atmosphere as a starting point. Beginning a scene setting like this in LightWave would be a dream come true.

Then adding ready-made volumetric clouds or turning the infinite plane into water with a click would make scene-building pure pleasure. I have often wished that Newtek would obtain the licence for such technology, and then using LightWave's powerful light settings, radiosity rendering and all the other goodies, one would get an inkling of what it would be like to be a god! The Ozone plug-in partially fills this gap, but it's not enough. I can see the future of LightWave as a magic box, allowing the artist the freedom to dip in and create new worlds with only a few clicks.

What spec machine(s) are you using it on at the moment?

Recently, I had just one day to produce a futuristic ray-traced image for a big ad campaign, and I bought a Mac G5 with dual processors and two gig of ram to do this. I came back from the briefing at 1pm in the afternoon, picked up my G5 from the dealer on the way home, loaded LightWave, created the scene and delivered the job the following morning. On the G5 it took LightWave only four hours to render rather than the estimated forty hours on my old G4. As an example of beautiful synchronicity the job also paid for the new machine.

Are there any plug-ins you wouldn't be without?

Definitely Worley's G2 and Sasquatch. Rounder also proved very useful - this really should be part of the programme. I noticed LightWave version 8 will integrate a number of other plug-ins like the bridge tool, which is useful.

There are some really good plug-ins which other LightWave users

may find very useful: Metal-, Water- and Glass surfaces by WORMS OF ART. They save a lot of guesswork when trying to created realistic textures.

In your opinion: Integrated or Separated? :)

An integrated Ozone type plug-in and an infinite plane. As far as the software goes, I would prefer the software to be one package, but somehow I got used to working in two different environments and it doesn’t bother me.

What's the largest image you have rendered?

The largest image I have ever rendered was 14,000 pixels by 3,600 and was a double centre spread for the new Readers Digest World Atlas, which will come out in July 2004.

Have you got a favourite artist to inspire you?

Curiously enough the art I find most inspiring has little to do with computer art. Inspiration to me means to stir you into action to create, not necessarily to emulate. It is more about essence than appearance. When I studied fine art in Hamburg I looked at the avant-garde like Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse and big scale Painters like Anselm Kiefer. I still get a kick out of looking at some modern art. Quality work evokes experiences within you, you haven’t known before.

But inspiration comes from many sources, Playing on my old synthesizer, can be one of them. And of course I always look at what other 3D artists are up to.

The most important point I find is not to get too close to reality unless a client wants me to. But even then I try add an element which would be difficult to achieve with photography (see the frozen salmon image). Emulating reality is only good for developing technical skills or when a photograph can’t be obtained. Photography is much better at reality than CG. I am more interested in just keeping on the edge of realism and somehow bring into the picture a subtle lyrical quality, which is difficult to define and makes you want to look at a picture again and again, not even knowing why. So that’s why inspiration can come from many sources.