Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make computer generated movies and pictures. Having just an Apple ][ severely restricted what I could do due to limited processing power and graphics capabilities. I was forced to render simple wire-frame models and film them straight from the screen to Super-8 movie film. The results were not stellar.

(ahh, the times of very slow computers! To keep myself from going insane clicking the movie camera after each frame finished, I built myself a little remote control device that plugged into the Apple's game port. I was then able to have the computer trigger the movie camera to snap one frame after it completed. Too bad the whole sequence was recorded out of focus. Yes, the camera was capable of snapping one frame of movie film. A fourteen year old animator's dream.)

Now I have a powerful Windows 10 machine (3.5GHz, 12 virtual processors!) with great software and graphics capabilities. I got right to work. One thing I admitted to early on was I have no talent for making models. Please understand that my renderings were constructed from models built by other very talented (and very loaded with free time!) people out on the internet. Without them, I'd still be rendering movies of boxes and such. See the credits.

I initially used trueSpace 3.0 from Caligari (which now no longer exists) to make a few movies. I don't use that any more because was pretty limited for what I wanted to do. I switched to Lightwave 3D (now up to 2020) from Newtek. Alas, support for Lightwave seems to have evaporated. The new owners sent a very supportive letter indicating their never-ending love for it, which is code-speak for "it's as dead as a doornail." I've now begun teaching myself how to use Blender. It's quite a rich product and does nearly everything Lightwave does, only much faster and quite a lot cheaper.

I've also written some extension plugins for Lightwave using their plugin SDK. Not much there yet, but you may find them useful if you're a 'waver yourself.

Finally, I've written a couple of tutorials. Check them out.