3d Graphics Experience

My experience with 3d art and animation began with the release of the Commodore Amiga series of computers in the late 1980’s. I scored an Amiga A1000 and began experimenting with programs such as VistaPro (a fractal terrain generator) and Aegis Animator (basic polygonal modeler, animator, and painting). The A1000/500 Amigas were limited back then (A 7MHz Motorola 68K computer with a whopping 1MB of RAM), so when I got ahold of Lightwave 3d 1.0 in 1990, you could tell that I was going to need an upgrade.

My last Amiga was a 25MHz 2500UX with a Bridgeboard and Emplant Mac emulator, and was capable of running AmigaDOS, MSDOS, Unix, and MacOS pretty much simultaneously. True computer multitasking was officially a thing.

By the early- mid 1990’s, high-end 3d was limited to the realm of Silicon Graphics Workstations running Power Animator (the grandfather of what would  later be Autodesk Maya) and SoftImage.  A MIPS-processor-based SGI Iris Indigo ran north of $40,000 with Power Animator an additional $15K.

This worked out pretty well, as the time I left college for my first undergraduate degree, 3d software and hardware had become much more affordable. Sadly, the Amiga had expired the year I graduated (thanks Commodore), but I was fortunate enough to land a job testing games at Interplay Entertainment Corp, testing Carmageddon and Fallout 2.

My embedded QA work within Black Isle Studios on Fallout 2 provided an opportunity to work as a 3d Artist on Planescape: Torment. Fortunately for me, they were using Lightwave 5.0. I would spend the next 10 years in game development, creating art and animation as a 3d generalist.

After I left games I worked as a 3d artist in a variety of fields, including advertising, e-learning, serious games/simulation as well as creating and running an architectural visualization department in a civil-engineering firm. I taught Advanced Animation and Game Design as a Lead Instructor for John’s Hopkins University.

After taking a break in 2010, I started my second undergraduate degree and began applying 3d recording to archaeology research, using laser scanning of artifacts, sites, and human skeletal remains on loan from other Universities. Since graduation, I have continued to apply 3d art, recording techniques, and gamification to archaeology and other fields. My last two positions being as an Archaeology Research Program Manager (essentially an Archaeological Computing Group), and Director of Development of a small company dedicated to 3d recording (digital twins), GIS, and gamification within archaeology. That company closed its doors earlier this year (2024), and here I am. I am currently neck-deep in Blender 3D, creating a small isometric RPG game demo I like to call Project: Eterna.