used to be in the hardware biz--and an early version of the Alias modeling
software. I got my first exposure to 3D at the school, and even got to take
a class taught by 3D graphics pioneer Jim Blinn. He had actually written
the 3D software we were being taught; it had no graphical interface, so
everything had to be typed in as sets of coordinates. Jim was a quirky
genius, but a very patient and thoughtful teacher. I talked to him years
later at SIGGRAPH, and he was pleased to find out that I had gone on to
work on one of his favorite games, Full Throttle.
Experimenting with 3D was a lot of fun, but the equipment was so expen-
sive that I never thought it would be practical to own myself. I wrote it off
and got into 2D graphics in the Mac lab. They had a room full of brand-
new compact Macintoshes! Later on, I bought my own Mac, an SE/20 with
a whole 20MB of hard drive space that cost me about $2600. I find it very
amusing that I have fifty times as much memory in my current system as
my Mac had in drive space. Anyway, it wasn't until a couple of years later,
while working in an industrial design studio, that I was able to play around
with Strata 3D software on the Mac. The output looked great, and a ray-
traced 160
× 100 image only took four hours to render! Still, that was what
really got me hooked on 3D--the software and hardware finally seemed
within my reach.
Those experiences from college and afterward introduced me to the basics.
I did only modeling at the time because animation was out of the ques-
tion--the long render times and the high cost of frame-by-frame output to
video made it impractical. My background in drafting and Jim Blinn's class
built a very solid foundation for my understanding of the 3D world. 3D
has some pretty abstract concepts that can be difficult to grasp, and were
especially hard back in those days, when 3D was a real unknown to most
people. My earlier forays into filmmaking also gave me a lot of experience
in the areas of pacing, shot blocking, editing, and camera and light place-
ment, all of which became invaluable later on.
Q: What 3D software do you use, and why?
A: I started using 3D Studio (DOS) around 1992. At that time, I believe
LightWave 3D was available only on the Amiga, and PC hardware was
much cheaper than Mac stuff. I needed to buy both a new machine and
the software, and a PC with 3D Studio was the most affordable combina-
tion. It also seemed to be the most powerful tool at the time in its price
range. I owned LightWave for a few months in the mid-nineties, but
frankly could never get used to its archaic interface and modular design.
3 D G
R A P H I C S
& A
N I M A T I O N
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