3D Modeler Interviews
At this point, let's take a break from looking at tools and processes to hear
from two different artists on the subject of advanced modeling, from sexy
sports cars to Star Wars X-Wings.
Modeling Sports Cars and Spacecraft: An Interview
with 3D Artist Mike Jones
Mike Jones was born in San Francisco in 1978 and grew up in the Bay Area.
He currently works for Westwood Studios Pacific as a game cinematic artist.
Mike has been working in the games industry for almost six years and has
credits in a dozen published games, including Hot Shots Golf 2, Motor City
Online, Red Alert 2, Emperor: Battle for Dune, and Yuri's Revenge. He finds it
kind of ironic that he ended up pursuing a career in art when he spent
most of his youth trying to avoid it; he originally was interested in becom-
ing a writer.
I met Mike while directing the Mechwarrior 3 cinematics. I had just hired
3D artist Eric Ronay to do animation on the project and was looking for
one more artist, primarily to do the effects work. Eric told me about his for-
mer co-worker, Mike Jones, and I brought him in for an interview. He had
some nice-looking work from an unpublished Star Trek game on his reel,
including a planet explosion effect, so I hired him on the spot. In addition
to Mech, we worked on a couple of other projects together while at Mondo
Media, including Under Cover and Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire.
Q: What made you want to get into 3D?
A: In the middle of high school, I found my calling in computers and start-
ed taking programming classes in Basic, Pascal, C, C++, and a little bit of
Assembly coding. Of course, the first thing that I wanted to code was a
game. I started working on a role-playing game, and actually got farther
along with it than I thought I would--far enough that it was time to come
up with a way to visually represent the world I had created. A friend of
mine, Andrew Backer, showed me a program called 3D Studio R4 (DOS),
and I used it to create several very basic objects for the game. I was instant-
ly hooked on the program and ended up spending all my spare time learn-
ing to use it.
3 D G
R A P H I C S
& A
N I M A T I O N
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