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The Story

So Far...

In early 2001, shortly after the launch of Newtek's Lightwave3D version 6, Ben Haines (a novice LW user at that point) dreamt up a website focused on sharing Lightwave presets. Little did he know at the time what the site would grow into. To turn the idea into reality he convinced one of his best friends Tom Carter to help him out.

After several very late nights and plenty of encouragement from people in community PresetCentral.com finally launched on 2nd March 2001. It was a huge overnight success. So successful in fact that the poor little server it was hosted on couldn't sustain the load. After a few days the server load got back to normal and the community steadily grew to over 3500 users.

Sadly in 2004 the server was hacked. No one was to blame, but it meant the hosting company tried to bill the team for 6+TB worth of bandwidth. At 1$ per GB of bandwidth the bill was way too much to stomach. So the hosting company pulled the plug along with the database. We had a copy of our PresetCentral's source code, but sadly it was the database that was the really valuable part of the equasion.

... and Now!

Now, 4 years on, we find ourselves launching the long (very long!) awaited successor to PresetCentral.com. After several years of (intermittent) effort the site is finally done. Andrew Rowson has taken PresetCentral.com to the next level, introducing a client that simplyfies and speeds up the PresetCentral experience. Matt Gorner has kindly turned the site into a Web 2.0 wunder with delightful eye candy. Dan Barker, Steve (DigiFreak) and Ben Vost have been instrumental in guiding the development of the site and have given it a real buzz.

All there is left to say is that we have all enjoyed working on the project and that we hope the Lightwave community enjoy it too. Remember to share! ;)

The PresetCentral.com Team

The Team (...with possibly too many people named "Ben")