3D Animation and Me

My right wrist is syncopated to the rhythm of music streaming through my ears, feeding my subconscious. With each twist, small layers of volume build and come together, realizing an object that was until recently confined to the isolated walls of my skull. Within minutes I’ve created from nothing, a realized prototype. I stop; adjust the focus of my eyes, and analyze this creation. Perhaps I should make the face longer, maybe the brows more defined, more muscle, or perhaps more bone. The variations are infinite. Back at it, I try some of these ideas, cntrl+z (The control key plus the z key on a keyboard; a common hotkey for undoing an operation). I experiment more, toying with shape and form, cntrl+z again. I keep trying new ideas, exploring until I’ve achieved a form that I like, sometimes love. Ideally, I aim for a form that is more interesting than originally envisioned.


What am I doing exactly you may wonder? I am sculpting, but not in a traditional sense, I am sculpting digitally, and it is just as fast as sketching with a pencil! Using an application called ZBrush (A computer program for both Windows and Macintosh that is geared towards digital sculpting and painting), I can create anything I can imagine from nothing. The creation process in ZBrush is simple, most 2d (two-dimensional) artists could make the jump to 3d (three-dimensional) within a day using ZBrush. It was not always like this. Before, software like ZBrush, objects had to be created insipidly, polygon by polygon. This is a much more time consuming and less creative process.


I thoroughly enjoy creating things virtually. It’s not just a simple hobby, but something I’m very serious about and want to do as a career. Outsiders who have never been exposed to the clockwork of computer graphics sometimes give the field less credit than more traditional mediums. I consider 3d graphics, video games, and graphic design to be true art form. Being something that I’m obsessed with, I find this to be a wonderful subject to blog about!


My fascination with 3d animation sparked in 1997 when my father gave me a program called Bryce 3D.  This program gave me the ability to create virtual worlds complete with mountains, skies, lakes, and some primitive objects. I was entertained for weeks, but eventually I developed an itching to create my own characters, vehicles, and buildings. Bryce 3D did not have polygonal modeling tools, I was limited to cubes, spheres, torus’s, and pyramids. At the time I was unable to find any affordable programs that I could convince my parents to buy me.  An everyman’s 3d software package simply did not exist then, only pricey programs used exclusively by Hollywood artists. My fascination with 3d soon simmered, but never died.

Currently I am modeling a robotic character for a shortfilm. I first started this character using a polygonal process in Autodesk Maya 2012 (A very popular 3d software program, in fact it is installed on just about every computer at the University of Utah if you’re curious. In case you were wondering, there’s no relation to the Mayan calendar.), and I am finding modeling in Maya to be simply tedious. Ergo, I switch to my favorite polygonal modeling program, Modo by Luxology, and find the process to flow much smoother. Maya is an incredibly powerful program, it can do it all, but this is also Maya’s downfall. Modo has been optimized for modeling, which works out in my favor for this task. As a 3d artist, jumping between different software programs is similar to switching from a pen to a pencil. Both work in a similar fashion, but I see each as simply a tool and I will use whichever one works best for my situation.

At the age of twelve, a diehard computer nerd, I was experimenting with different Linux distributions, aka “distros”, compiling code and adjusting the components of the OS (operating system) to suite my tastes. During this time I discovered a program called Blender 3d. This was a Linux program for 3d Modeling and Animation; the best part, completely free, but not yet open source. Where Bryce 3d had sparked a mere fascination, Blender was a gateway, a black hole with no escape. Instead of exhausting my time manually compiling source code when I could simply download a pre-compiled binary(After a program has been transcoded from Human-readable code to machine code, it is referred to as an executable binary.), I spent this time learning everything I possibly could about this program and 3d Animation in general. Like any skill, I was just terrible at first, but with my over-obsessive desire to realize my ideas in three dimensions, I prevailed.