David: I started in the early 80's as a teenager, with very simple graphics programming on a BBC Micro with 32KB of RAM. Around 1987, I got an Archimedes A310 which opened up the world of raytracing to me. You had to type the position of every single triangle in the scene and then wait a week or more to see how the image looked. In 1991, I started working professionally with 3D Studio Release 1, and have carried on using 3ds Max ever since.

David: Most people only know me through my plugins site, but my day job mostly involves making TV commercials and product visualisations. Readers living in Germany may have seen my work if they happen to watch daytime TV, but there is nothing very high profile that I can name here. The biggest project is my work for my plugins site, trying to keep old plugins alive and making them available for everyone to use. I am also always on the lookout for extinct commercial plugins in the hope that I can persuade the programmers to let me update and re-release the plugins as freeware.

David: I am a freelancing generalist, so I use 3ds Max for just about everything except character animation, which I'm not particularly good at. A large number of my jobs are one-man shows, where I do everything including all of the compositing and editing. I also do a fair bit of scripting with MAXScript, both for myself and commercially.

David: As a freelancer, I get to work on a great variety of jobs, mostly alternating between 3D, compositing and writing MAXScripts. It's the variety of work available that I find most exciting, I never know what I will be working on in the coming months.

David: As Avatar has shown, it looks like the 3D side of the industry is going to be big over the next few years. It won't be long until other branches of the industry jump on the 3D bandwagon, such as architectural visualisation and product visualisation. The possibilities are huge, and the technology keeps getting better.

David: Be prepared to never stop learning. The 3D world never stops advancing, and if you don't keep up with it, it will leave you behind. If you are not interested in learning, then you have already been left behind.