I thought it would be nice to give a bit of background and ultimately show a few examples of my journey into the wonderful world of 3d design and visualization.

I started my journey back at college when I saw an early version of Stratavision, it looked amazing, but as with all things in those days, although the Poly had a copy, you weren’t really allowed to use it ! Then as my degree course was coming to an end, a new animation department opened and a handfull of SGI machines appeared. Again we were not allowed too close to these, but I saw the potential of what could be achieved and it led me to persue a Mac 3d package that I could run on my Mac (an LCIII, wicked at the time).

This 3d design and rendering package was called Infini-D and was made by Specular, if you remember it then you’ll remember it fondly as I do ! These were the days when you saw pretty much nothing shaded in the viewports as you worked, real time shading was stuff of the future. As for rendering, well you could raytrace if you had all week ! so rendering was either simply, shade fast, better or best !

I loved the package and stayed with it at my first job at Pilot. Whilst at Pilot we also bought Strata Studio Pro, which was a major investment at the time. To be honest I found it a real pain to use and the lack of any kind of model history meant you were committed all the way through the modeling process, raytracing was nice though.

After moving the The Attik, I went for FormZ and Electric Image, a well used combination on the mac. For 3d visualization of products and packaging, I still used Infini-D as it was getting better with every version, but Electric image was great for the kind of abstract 3d motion graphics work I was producing at The Attik. It has to be said that all this time I was still on the Mac, the only reason I touched a PC was for cross-platform interactive CD and presentation authoring when I needed to use Macromedia Director on the PC.

When I moved to Ripe, I still used my old favorites, Infini-D and Electric Image, but now I needed to step up the 3D rendering and animation tools to the next level. I had dealt with a supplier called Symbiosis in Leaminton Spa for a number of years and saw that they were moving to 3D Studio Max on the newly released SGI NT workstations. As in these early days, your average PC couldn’t run a 3D rendering and modeling program like Max very well, you needed something a bit special and the SGI was just the ticket. We bought on, an SGI 320 (dual Xeon) and it was brilliant.

I began my 3d design journey into Max, into Poly’s nurbs and patch modeling, all things i’d never used before. In these days, the web was in it’s infancy, so online tutorials were scarce, so I was in it alone to a large degree. Amazon did well out of my, buying 3DS Max books for a while until I started to get to grips with everything. The SGI usually came home from work with me at the weekend and in the holidays so I could learn and do tutorials. In the end I’d had enough of lugging it about and managed to buy my own 2nd Hand SGI 320 and flat panel monitor, it was beautiful !

So Max quickly became the only 3d software I used, I loved it, it was such a far cry for the software i’d used up until this point. I began looking into Maya when I had become proficient with Max, and took advantage of one of those sneaky ‘cross-upgrades’ when Alias was trying to poach Discreet customers ! I spent roughly 2 years on and off learning Maya, but generally finding it frustrating rather than inspiring. For me Max is like a one stop shop that does everything really quite well, when combined with things like Vray for rendering and a few choice plugins it’s really hard to beat. Maya on the other hand is I feel much more of a specialist tool that’s designed for a 3d pipeline with a number of contributers. Max is much more geared towards a one or 3 man setup. I loved learning Maya and will hopefully pick it up again in the future, but after spending a greta deal of time with Max and then learning the intricacies of the Vray rendering system, I feel i’ll always prefer Max’s one box approach to every 3d design brief.

I’m now learning z-brush, which is a totally different beast to anything else i’ve tried, it’s great, baffling, but brilliant at what it does. I’m currently reading a couple of books i’ve bought and am well into it. Getting it to play nicely with Max is tricky but i’m getting there.

Who knows what will be next, watch this space !