How did everyone here get into the 3d world?
Sup,
I was wondering what got people into 3d animation and how they started in their adventure.
To be honest, I wanted to be a chef in high school but changed my mind when I got a huge love for art and video games. I just wanted to create new worlds and give life to the ideas just rotting away in my head. Now, im going to be getting my AS degree soon and will have a lot of free time learning udk and getting my art skills to the next level. (Sorry if this sounds cheesy but whatever)
Story time ^^/
I was wondering what got people into 3d animation and how they started in their adventure.
To be honest, I wanted to be a chef in high school but changed my mind when I got a huge love for art and video games. I just wanted to create new worlds and give life to the ideas just rotting away in my head. Now, im going to be getting my AS degree soon and will have a lot of free time learning udk and getting my art skills to the next level. (Sorry if this sounds cheesy but whatever)
Story time ^^/
Replies
I first got interested by mucking around in the TES IV editor, made some dumb mods, then wanted to make a map for my Quake 3 clan, after which I decided to check out a more modern engine (UT3). After realising you now needed to make 3d models to make levels, I decided to start getting good at 3d stuff. I haven't really gotten back to much level design since then...
Anyway, I took interest in art and so the guys who ran the shop installed Maya personal learning edition 8 I believe on my PC and recruited me to their game dev project. Which was pretty much a blatant starcraft ripoff and didn't go anywhere as far as I know. But since then I dabbled in 3d art, although for my teenage years it was mostly just 1 model of a sword or helmet in a different free 3d program every year.
I wish I had done more with it, but even being slightly familiar with working in 3d helped me a lot down the line.
I got a job doing MilSim stuff four years ago. I do hard edge realistic modelling at work and usually do more fantasy or hand painted stuff at home to break things up.
Once there was a new game announced which main selling point (,or the only reason some people noticed it) was that my country actually published a game (a small F2P title). I liked that idea, so I started being active at their forums (game then died and only 3 people remained on its forum: my old cringeworthy me, brony and nyan cat guy....pretty cool people
My brother started liking the idea of being active at forums, so he jumped to as many forums as possible. On one of which there was guy working in Google Sketchup at Fan art section. Bro showed me his work and I gave sketchup a shot. When it turned out far better than expected.
From jealousy my bro found "one of actually used" modeling packages (blender). After about 3-5 hours of learning he gave up, "because he can't work with broken mouse wheel" (another story)...I moved to blender.
I wasn't still regularly practicing and working only when feeling like it. That changed thanks to Feng Zhu and very creative fandom that I become part of after bro "converted me" (he became part of the fandom because the brony at my first forum convinced him to give the show (and fandom) a chance).
I got onto polycount and found Feng Zhu's youtube channel thanks to reddit (which he found, again thanks to the fandom).
Tldr: Me getting on a forum caused my bro to become "that guy" on gaming forums (that also ended up on 4chan), and me because of that getting into 3D and getting onto polycount.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=89972
Then there came a time I felt that I had to make a decision about choosing a more " fundamental" role for myself. Then I went ahead and made the mistake of my life and got advice from a person I should have never gotten from.
He said " Yo mate go and be a "modeller" , programming is like suuuper hard and it is all math like ..." I was convinced at the time. It became clear later that anything art related was something I should have stayed away.
At the end I was able to figure things out make good character models "BUT " it took "TOO GOD DAMN LONG" because I had no idea about the subject and had to start from A.
It took 4 + years.
I recently started coding in CryEngine, which is said to be hardest to learn. After 2 weeks I was able to create almost any entity that almost does anything I want.
Moral of the story:
Kids.... Never listen anyone else about your future. If you feel it doesn't sit well with you... quit it. The sooner the better.
I took a college level art class in high school, but really didn't know what I wanted to do with it. Thought about comic books or something similar. The Art Institute of Houston was something I had always heard about, and after getting out of high school and not really knowing what to do, went up there and talked to them. Showed them my portfolio and they said I should really either sign up for the Graphic Design program or the Animation Art and Design program. I went to the portfolio show and saw the animation reels and felt like that was something I really wanted to do. I just really jumped into it and felt like I had found my calling so to speak.
Since my pc was neither good at runing the newest games and also by not having an internet connection i started playing with Wings3D...love at first sight.
After a while a neighbour provided me with a pirated copy of...3ds Max and i've started doing most of the tuts that were in the help.(awesome tuts btw).
Time passed, i got an internet connection, joined a few 3d sites even trolled some ...i was the worst shit
The idea of thinking of a place, and then being able to actually make it real within the 3d world was and still is so amazing to me. At the time though, I was limited because of the modding tools and what not and it was pissing me off, so I said, you know what, how do I make shit from scratch. I want to make my own things and bring my ideas to life. A few years later, around sophomore/junior year in high school I discovered UDK and the amazing people from 3DBuzz (Zak Parish is awesome) who started me on my journey to environment art. And with the extremely helpful people from Polycount I'm where I'm at now
On the serious note. I have been a fan of what goes behind the scenes in making games since I played the first game on CGA computer which was called "Digger," (it wasnt as interesting now that I think about it, but it thats what got me starting to look in to Graphics design and coding.) along with many other CGA games that I cant remember from the top of my head. What got me interested was the idea of how everything comes together the CG, animation, coding, TnL, etc. I only started taking CG side of things and 2d art seriously 2 years ago because I had ideas that were hard to describe and it was time for me to start doing something about it. Therefore I entered the 3d world. Before that our professors in Centennial college gave us a bad image of the 3d artists because he was all about promoting XNA game studio and he was also a suck up for Microsoft. I would've started earlier but my professors kept on telling us that CGers makes only 8 bucks an hour aday (man I laugh at that conversation everytime I recall it. lol)
Eventually I wanted to be a part of something more interactive so I switched to games
So I took the obvious path of becoming a professional falconer, of course! I scared seagulls off of runways and landfills for over a decade, driving around in a truck with my trained falcons and pyrotechnics.
But then a friend of mine in the cg industry suggested I look into 3d modeling as something I might find interesting. Within the first few minutes of that first shitty youtube tutorial on Maya I was hooked. I had this feeling that I had finally found my destiny. So I dropped everything and moved to Seattle where I took some classes at the art institute for a year. I learned some basics there, but got most of my knowledge online and from a certain forum
So here I am two and a half years after I fist found out about the world of 3d modeling. I just finished my internship at Arenanet and I feel so happy that I finally figured out what I wanted to do with my art. Even if it is a little late in life.
Yeah it's been a while ago.
how did everyone get into the third world?
Ohh. So it was that
You get unlucky before even born. That is how you get into 3rd world
But yeah, nothing super special how i actually got into the industry. I was just wondering what would i want to do with my life and making games sounded cool. Happened to get to a school on animation / games studies and i immediately realized this was my thing. Another short (3 months) games studies after that and internship at Remedy. Aaand im still here.
I took it sort of serious when I saw the "making of Oblivion" dvd that came with the Special Edition of the game. Bunch of guys were sitting around a table with swords on it talking about how one would actually go about swinging them, and they were getting paid for it, I was sold.
1 liter of golem's blood
1 branch of oak tree from netherlands
10 fire imps from mount doom.
oh wait you said if I read third, no sir I read 3D world.
Then I met a friend of a friend of a friend at a hookah bar. Just hanging out and chatting. And he talked about how he just graduated from Uni and got an internship at Disney. That he'll be moving out to Cali for it. He even whipped out his phone and showed me his demo reel. Which, at the time I had no idea what that was.
I told him that was really cool. And how like every kid "I wanted to make video games when I grow up" But never had the talent to do something like that. But he reassured me that I could learn. And he gave me a free lesson in Maya. And 2 years later...I'm in the industry.