My first 3D Artwork

About the project

I think it's interesting to look back at my first 3D graphics, and see what inspired me back then. Again, the Star Wars references keep sneaking in, but this time my love of Lego and Pixar films also make an appearance.

Looking at these render now, they seem very crude compared to how I was drawing at the time. I seem to recall that I weren't that keen on making a career out of 3D. I thought it was fun and kind of magical to see these images come to life computationally (remember, I was also fascinated by programming), but I was more interested in storytelling and traditional animation. Getting a job at video game company Funcom made me do the switch from illustration to 3D. I had some of the animations at the bottom in my portfolio, and because of that they hired me as their first full-time 3D artist.

Actually, these weren't my first attempts at 3D. I played a bit with 3D on the Amiga, using a program called Sculpt 4D. The only remaining artifact from that period is the graphed out drawing below - that was how I planned my 3D models back then. But then I discovered 3D Studio on the PC, and that was the first program that let me model and animate in a truly intuitive way.

Below are some of the first animations I did, also done in 3D Studio. The flickering on the Death Star was a huge problem, I remember. That was a result of geometry problems when cutting into the model to make the equatorial trench. That still bugs me actually!

Note that I signed my animation with MSP, which was the name of the demo-group I was in at the time.

I remember seeing Luxo Jr on the TV, which really wowed me. I was so fascinated by the technical details in that film; how the shadows moved, the subtle animation on the cord. And of course how a stiff object like a lamp could have personality - which went totally against what I read in animation books at the time. So I just had to copy it, even though I didn't get very far.

The last two animations on this page were done after I was hired as a 3D artist at Funcom, which was my first job. The special thing about them is that they were skinned creatures with animated bones inside. Up to that point, the only way I could animate an object was by cutting it into smaller parts, or animating stiff objects (like the lamp). But a company released this add-on to 3D Studio that let me create bones, and do proper soft-tissue animation. Now, that was a huge thing in 1994, and the quality of my little dinosaur animation impressed me a lot back then. See that skin stretching! I still think it looks kind of cool :)

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