Blog

Mark Segasby

I am co-founder of Lightmap - the company behind HDR Light Studio development. I'm a 3D product designer by training and spent years in design consulting. I embraced computer-aided design and visualization in its early days. During my time producing product visualisations, I trained myself to replicate studio lighting methods using 3D software and this led to the idea for HDR Light Studio... a tool I wanted to have and as it turned out other 3D artists did too. My favorite parts of my job are designing new software features and seeing what our customers create.

A few words about me and my background as a 3D Designer/Visualizer

As a boy, I went to my dad’s small graphic design studio after school to help out. Dad got some of the first Apple Mac computers in the UK with Adobe Illustrator 88 and Photoshop 1. I developed a passion for using computers for my creative design work. I loved how precise and perfectly I could make my designs, and the experimentation software tools allowed. I went on to study 3D Product Design at University where I learned to use 3ds Max Release 4 to model and render many of my 3D designs. I was very lucky to have my own Pentium 90 PC and a legit copy of 3ds Max. I fell in love with 3D computer graphics.

Once I graduated, I taught students how to render products old style, using pens and pencils. I also taught myself how to model and render using Alias software, which was a dream of mine for years before this. It cost so much that I had to choose between paying for training and not owning a license, or buy a license and use the manual to train myself. So I trained myself and owned my license, which cost a fortune via a big bank loan. My Alias skills helped me to land my dream job as a product designer at Priestman Goode where I worked hard on many rewarding design projects. I look back fondly on my time working in London. After this, I set up in business for myself and learned Maya for Visualization and SolidWorks for product modelling.

I loved product visualization and invested heavily in a specialist renderer using custom hardware called RenderDrives (by ArtVPS) which were compatible with Maya. These computers used patented raytracing processors and were way ahead of their time – they produced stunning fully ray-traced images. I produced photo-real images as close to photography as I could and learned a lot about materials and lighting during this time. I like to think that for the time my renderings were pretty good, and I hope they still look good today.

Then came our HDR Light Studio adventure – looking back writing this bio, it feels like it was meant to be. I now love using my design skills to develop lighting tools that I would want to use too. I care about what the software looks like, how it functions and its usability. I understand the challenges our customers face as I have been a 3D artist myself. The best part of my job is seeing the imagery our customers create with the help of HDR Light Studio. Even though I don’t make 3D imagery myself nowadays for a living, there’s a tiny part of me in those customer images via HDR Light Studio.

Connect with me on linkedin here