work on my new portfolio and helped me cut everything together for my
reel. With a new reel in hand, I sent it off to all the game developers I knew.
I then waited for a very disappointing two months, during which I didn't
receive a reply from any of them.
It's sad but often true--getting into these companies requires that you have
contacts as well as a good reel. You can have the best reel in the world, but
if it gets buried in some pile in the Human Resources Department, it does
you no good. When I came to finally understand that, I gave my reel to a
headhunting firm. They have people within the game companies whom
they talk to on a regular basis, and may even get first pick of positions
before they're advertised. Anyway, my reel was sent around to the industry
again, this time by the headhunter. I got six calls for interviews in the first
week alone! In the end, there were two good offers that I had to choose
from: one would have had me living in Hawaii, which is obviously a huge
plus, and the other was Westwood Studios in Southern California.
Although I would have loved to live in Hawaii, I felt that working for an
established company was far more secure and would look better on my
resume.
When I first got started at Westwood, I was brought in as an in-game asset
artist for Red Alert 2. I modeled a lot of the interface and created some of
the art assets for the cities. As soon as that project shipped, our parent com-
pany in Las Vegas requested some help on the cinematics for Emperor: Battle
for Dune. Several in-game artists were pulled in to help, and I was one of
them. They liked the work that I did on it so much that I was promoted to
the cinematics department for our next project, Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge.
I was the only artist in the cinematics department using 3ds max; everyone
else was using Maya. The reason was that there was no time to teach me
Maya before the next project started, so I was allowed to use max to do my
portion of it. Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I jumped at
the chance to work on the intro cinematic because it featured a battle going
on around the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island.
Because no one else in the department knew 3ds max, I had to do all the
modeling, texturing, animation, and effects for the intro by myself. It was
some of the most fun I've had on a project yet. It took just under two
months of hard work to produce, but I also think that it's some of my best
work yet. The entire CG sequence was only a minute long, but in the end,
it was totally worth all the long hours. Westwood was so happy with the
quality that they decided to have the entire cinematic team switch over to
3ds max for the next project!
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