Tell us a bit about yourself.

I have always been passionate about films and in particular the world of special effects. The excitement was always in peeling back the layers and trying to figure out how they were done.

When I started out there were very few CG animation degrees so I ended up studying computer programming at Leeds University. While there, I spent most of my time learning the basics of animation partly from books and films, but mostly from just observing the world around me.

My first job was working on the special effects on a horror movie interspersed with training and technical support for LightWave. I became Director of Animation for AMGFX part of VTR (Now the Hive) in 1996.

In January 2000 I started Darkside Animation with Andrew Bishop and Keith Reeves, shortly after Robert Twitcher joined the team and the company has grown steadily from there.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

It must have been late 1992 or early 1993 when I first became aware of LightWave as images of Babylon Five started to trickle across from America. I was blown away. Up until that time I had been using Real 3D, which was well ahead of its time, unfortunately it wasn’t that intuitive and you needed a degree to get anything decent from it.

When did you first start using it?

I spent all my savings and bought LightWave version 3.5 in 1994 and ran it on an Amiga 1200. Then took the plunge and moved over to PC with version 4.0 in 1995 and been growing with the package ever since.

What do you like about the package?

It has always been about speed and ease of use for me. Straight out of the box I could achieve 90% of what I wanted and the other 10% can always be squeezed out of the package by hook or by crook.

What could be improved for you?

There is always room for improvement and I would have to say that workflow and scene management would be at the top of my list, closely followed by better image handling. I would also like to see much greater use of GPU hard-coded effects and programmed shaders. Games are pulling off some pretty amazing things in real-time. The 3D industry needs to take a look at how they are operating and quick! There are already fledgling real-time movies being made.

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

At the office we are running a mixture of dual Xeon and single P4 2.8GHz machines we are waiting for the 4GHz processors sometime this year before we do our next major overhaul. These all link to our render farm which consists of eight 2.8GHz P4s.

At home I run a similar setup with a couple of P4 2.8GHz networked and a mirror of our server so that I can keep on plugging away into the small hours.

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

Steve Worley is the man, his plug-ins are incredible, we mostly use G2 and Sasquatch. Pawel Olas is another amazing programmer we use every one of his tools in one way or another.

There are several freebie plug-ins that we get from Flay that slot well into our pipeline.