Dave Jerrard

We recently got the opportunity to speak to Dave Jerrard, longtime Lightwave guru and familiar face in the Lightwave community about his experiences in 3D, his favorite software, and the CG Industry in general.

By Adam 'NLightUK' Hauldren

SQ - Can you tell us a little about yourself, and how you got started in 3D? I first started dabbling in 3D in the late 80’s, on my brother’s Amiga 1000, using a small command line raytracer called DBW Render. It was amazing to know that 3D imagery could be created on a home computer, and the first (and only image) I did with it was a simple silver ball on a checker board that only took 8 hours to render at 640x480, in 16 color greyscale. Later, I got a hold of Sculpt 4D and started modeling stuff myself, and in early 1990, I had a full 3D model of the starship Enterprise and a Klingon Bird Of Prey. A few months later, after sharing several renders of those with friends, I got a call from a multimedia company in town that saw my work in Toronto, where my brother worked at Gold Disk. They were working on a multimedia presentation system, and one of the very first non-linear editors, called ShowMaker. The company in town was beta testing it and creating a demo reel for it, and they asked me if I could create some content for it.

SQ - What tools do you use to create your stunning images? I pretty much live in LightWave. I’m fairly proficient in Photoshop, but by no means a master in it. I generally use it for textures that have to be image maps, or for digital photography stuff, like creating birthday cards, or just spicing up photos a bit, usually for humorous effect. I’m not a fan of over processing or post processing work too much, unless that’s the goal from the start. I approach 3D like I do photography – I try to do as much in camera as possible. I find a lot of times that post processing takes the life or realism out of an image, often making it look dead or flat.