Bryce 3D was the first graphics program I learned in depth. My parents bought me a copy when I was 12 or 13 years old. Every day after school, I’d come home and spend the entire rest of the evening playing around, making silly space opera-themed renderings.
To this day, I think there’s something magical about the user interface. The big chunky camera controls — rendered by the program itself, as the back of the box proudly proclaimed — made it feel more like you were playing a strategy game than using an art tool.
A little later, I picked up a program with the oh-so-90s name PiXELS:3D Studio. This one was quite nifty. It exclusively used this stuff called NURBS — non-uniform rational basis splines. You created shapes by taking a single flat square, subdividing it an amount of your choosing along the length and width, and then folding it into your desired shape. Want a cylinder? Curl the square into a tube like you would with a sheet of paper. A sphere? Pinch the top and bottom of that tube. A cube? Squish the sides and pluck out the corners. Oh but wait — every NURBS object is smooth. That means to make a sharp edge, you need to add a bunch of subdivision and squeeze them together. Or… you could just make 6 flat squares, one for each side of the cube, and group them together. Weird. Okay.
So this program was great for making flat blobby things like water and round blobby things like aliens. It also had some wonderful shader-building tools, and inverse kinematics, and more. But it was terribly slow. And crashed a lot. And frequently made your saved files have 0 bytes. Notwithstanding, I spent years making art with it.
Around the same time, one of the other kids in my grade wanted to be friends. We started riding bikes together around town, practicing wheelies and hopping down stairs and other skatepark-reject tricks. He knew I was really into making 3d art, and he was just getting into making stuff too.
Him: “Do you have a website?”
Me: “I don’t know how to make a website.”
Him: “You get this program called Freeway, and you can put images in it. Then you go to Angelfire and they let you upload for free.”
So I did.
Bonus: here’s my profile from the PiXELS:3D message board.
I am a 15-year-old great-grandpa, and a grade 10 student living in central Alberta, Canada, and I just happen to be 6’4". It was an accident involving dental floss and lab monkeys. Anyways, I have recently decided (based on my cuz’s idea) to go by my middle name, Diego, as it sounds cooler then Ivan (In his, his girlfriend’s, and my opinion). I welcome any feedback on this decision.
On with the show:
In my life before school, I was very interested in constructing various crafts and projects (usually involving electricians tape, magnets, batteries, and toilet paper role centers cut into many interesting shapes :). I also had a minor obsession with construction and large vehicles.
When I was around six years old our family got its first computer, a Mac Plus, with a 20 mb HD and half an mb of ram. This is what started it all for me. On this Mac is where I played my first computer game (Brickels), made my first attempts at a CG (HyperCard).
More recently I purchased a SNES and became interested in video games. No matter how much my parents would like to deny it, this is how I became involved with computer graphics.
My Grandpa was a teacher at the University of Alberta, as well as a scientist. He is one of the reasons I quickly fell in love with 3D (the technical aspect). Both of my parents are theater instructors at Red Deer College, and my dad is an analog artist (he does watercolor paintings), and this is also what got me interested in 3D (the artistic aspect).
1997 is the year when we got our first REAL computer, a G3 266 All-In-One. I started on 3D when I was 12 years old, using a free version of Strata Vision 3D that I found on a Mac Addict CD (Nov. 98). After learning that and making a few basic animations, I briefly moved on to a demo of Strata Studio Pro. This move was short lived, and I then abandoned Strata completely, moving on to Bryce 3D. This is the program that really got me started in the 3D world. I was amazed -as most first time users are- at the simplicity with which I could create art that looked as good as (and sometimes better than) real life. I stayed with Bryce for a while, until I felt that I had out-grown the software. This is when I discovered Pixels, and it has captivated me ever since. I don’t yet feel that I have grown larger (figuratively speaking, of course) than pixels can hold, and I continue to learn new tricks and techniques all the time.
As of very recently, I have begun using 3DSMax extensively at school, and as a result have changed my life goal. The best description of my purpose in life is best described as the answer to the following question:
“Why,” you may ask, “would I spend weeks modeling the perfect objects for my perfect scenes in Max?” “Well,” I would respond, “It is so at the very end of my long session pulling my hair out desperately trying to get the dumb windows machine to work, I can add a few particle systems to my scene and watch everything explode into graceful, flaming ‘chunkies’. I can sit back and think to myself what a wonderful world we live in, when the end of everything’s life cycle is a destruction of sorts.”
This just reminded me of a lyric from a song by my favorite band (the Matthew Good Band) off their new CD (The Audio Of Being): “Some things may come, all things they go, and there ain’t nothing like exploding if you’ve go something to explode”
I hope to get a dual G4 800mhz, PIV, and Lightwave in the next few months. This will allow me to go way farther when creating art than I could ever before, with just Pixels 3.7 and my G3.
“All good things…”
Ivan Diego Reese
AKA: Sisoft, IvanArts, Jolly Green Giant.
Oh, and don’t ever take me seriously. Ever. Not even right now. For all you know, I could be lieing about telling you to not trust me. That would be a double negative, meaning you should trust me. But then I would be lieing and proving that I don’t lie. Kinda an ironic situation we have here. Almost paradox material. Yep. Thats my life. I hope you enjoyed laughing at me. I’ll try to change myself to suit the world. NOT. Which just reminded me of a quote at www.ivan.com:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
– George Bernard Shaw
I will change the world. Now, where did my pants go?
Last updated: 11/15/01