When did you start working with LightWave 3D and why? LightWave 3D in not a typical engineering software as far as I know....

I have been using it for 6 or 7 years. I became interested in Lightwave and 3D after attending a seminar by Joe Conte at the local college. He spoke passionately about 3D and the possibilties of using it in all different kinds of business. At that time my main job was using Acad for 2D drawings.
Little by little as I learned Lightwave I began to use it more in my everyday work.

How did you find out about infiniMap?

I read about the lite version at CGTalk. At the time I was doing a public presentation showing how a large creek flowing through a large Midwestern US city could flood during a big storm event. I had been trying to map 26 high resolution satellite photos to a ground surface. Total size of all the images was roughly 2.3 gigs and over 1.4 million polygons! As you can imagine  LightWave 3D (and my computer) was choking on this much image data. Time was running out and I had zero possibility of completing the animation on time. Just in the nick of time I heard about InfiniMap LE and it was a life saver!