When I was twelve or so, my parents moved to a farm. I wanted to buy a dirtbike, so I tried the farmboy scene, raised some animals, and made
about six grand one summer. My dad's an ER doctor, so he had seen enough dirtbike accidents to know not to let me kill myself on one. I
liked video games a lot, too, so instead I bought a copy of 3ds Max 1.0 after reading about 3d Studio 4 with the intention of making video games.

2) What sort of job did you do in last few years and what's your current job?

Over the last few years, my job was mainly avoiding expulsion from college and interning at my current place of employment, Fischer Edit.
I used to break into the arts building at UW-Madison and use the 3d lab there, which had max3 running on a quad Pentium III 300, which, if
nothing else, was a step up from max1 on an old laptop. For Fischer, I mostly concept and execute 3d for television commercials,
mostly for big-name clients. I try and stick to three points working--making it quality, making it quickly, and making it original.
It sounds pretty cliched, but I think they're very important things to respect. To combine the first two, especially as the sole 3d artist on
projects, is usually pretty challenging, and to do it, I need to cut corners wherever I can; I never use up render time or lighting where a
simple 2d image with an alpha on a plane will do, I don't use geometry where texture will do, and though I start with physical accuracy, that
usually goes out the window pretty quickly in favor of a 'look' (typically right after the first client presentation). As for originality, no matter how small the job is, I try to add some little flair that really shines the spot; if I have the latitude, I try and suggest alternative looks altogether.

In the end, I think anyone can use just one tool or program--you come up with something a bit better if you can combine several different tools
or techniques well, and you can do it quickly, and I try and consciously make sure I'm not just using one method in a project.

3) How do you rely on 3ds max in your work?

Well, as much as I like variety, max is my primary program--you can just do so much in it. I've done entire commercials which are just layers,
something you could do in any 2d animation package, but I do them in max as a series of planes in an orthographic viewport. You can do pretty
much anything in 2d in 3d, and then some--you always have that room to move around in your concept. I remember in high school doing all my
editing in max (I wouldn't really recommend this, but you can do it). I don't use max for a lot of the particle work we do, but that's because
the Flame we have just ends up being a lot faster; once the animations get difficult, though, I usually switch over to PFlow. I've also found,
and this is partly because I've been using it forever, that max has been the quickest 3d package to get things done in.

4) How have you customized 3ds max to work in your studio?

A nice thing about our studio is that we use so many discreet products that it didn't take a ton of customization to fit max into the
pipeline. I guess the easy answers are building my own UI and quad menus, writing a couple of scripts, and just spending some time figuring
out which formats move data across all our platforms well (we've generally had the most success with TIFF image sequences). Using Flame,
Smoke, and Combustion means that 3DS files move around well. I spent a little bit of time with our engineer setting up net-rendering
for Brazil r/s, mental ray, and the scanline, and that has paid off again and again when we have clients and deadlines hovering.

5) How did you come to learn this software? Was it trial and error, or did you attend professional classes?

The majority of it was done just spending the time and working through the pack-in tutorials and the user-reference in high school. I decided
I'd worry about trying to achieve artistic vision after I knew how the package worked; I wanted to make sure I didn't get too specialized
because I only ever played with certain aspects of the program. I've attended a few professional classes in the past year, but I'd say the
best were the discreet Evolve tour classes at SIGGRAPH last year through Oregon3D. It was pretty cool just to see a lot of luminaries of 3D come
in and just talk about whatever they wanted.

6) What's your favorite part of the process? Modeling, texturing, rigging?

It used to be modeling; I'd say that's where I spent most of my time originally. I still get a kick out of creating a sweet model and then
spinning it around in the viewport. Now, probably because of my job, I'm becoming more and more interested in photorealism and effect. I'm
fascinated by 3d that doesn't look 3d; I keep feeling that a lot of the easy 3d has been done, where a combination of a cool concept and a 3d
execution gives you something that looks cool, but you can tell isn't real. I think to reach a more mainstream audience, and even to really
touch the people who are fairly sophisticated in terms of fx, you need to sell your vision so that the medium isn't transparently evident in
the product. If you can make the final product look like a photograph, make someone believe, at a deep, sensory level, that this really might
exist somehow, I think that's the coolest. And then, if you can carry that into motion, into animation, I think you're set.

7) What are you working now? Sneak preview perhaps? :)

Catching up on sleep, but that's pretty much ongoing.

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