Why I Became a 3d Artist For Games
This page is entirely speculative. Knowing thyself is easier said than done!
TLDR:
I like making things. I like making lots of things and I like making things work together with dependencies & relationships.
I like making novel systems and alternative solutions to problems.
I also like taking things apart, when you take software apart It isn't "broken" the same way taking the ICs off a circuit-board breaks the hardware - both are fun.
(I know this is a TLDR with information not present in the main text, this page is a WIP)
Early Life
The famous 3 volt motorjet rocket
Basically I love making rockets and robots. When I was little I figured that I could just make drawings of rockets and robots that worked just as well as my real life attempts lol.
The link between making drawings and video games was clear to me as a child as I became obsessed with Age of Empires 1 (from the Kellogg's Nutri-Grain box) at the ripe old age of 4. My parents banned me from that game and from gaming in general because I would quote it in my sleep, but that's beside the point. There was clearly a way to translate some kind of drawing into some kind of simulated system on the computer where the pictures followed rules and can move around on their own and with instructions from me, amazing!
I would draw a lot a small child, one thing I totally loved drawing was entire scenes of maps with houses and roads which had people walking between them. I loved to imagine the routes each of the people would move to complete their tasks & how I might optimise their routes by adding stairways and tunnels. Later on these innocent winding mountainside scenes gave way to huge battlefields with all types of vehicles and infantry as I had advanced to playing Red Alert on the original Playstation. These types of drawings progressed into MS paint when I was made aware of its existence.
Later on when I got into primary school I was blown away by everything we could do with the computers, except for text editing, which sadly is the main part of the school curriculum. Something that was incredible is that you could access all of your own files from any of the computers in the whole lab, and apparently that meant you could put Age of Empires on all of the computers... But we where not quite that clever.
Around year 2 I tried to work out how high Ratchet jumps in Ratchet & Clank and how was it decided? Did the person who made the levels place a point in space for every possible apex of Ratchets jump? And for each rotation in space was there an additional point? How could the game makers know exactly where I would jump in order to place these points in just the right spots (literally everywhere). I decided to see if I could jump in weird places to see what would happen, and immediately I noticed that when I jump into a slope the peak of my jump was higher. There where no hand placed points in space. From then on I was obsessed with systems in video games.
Actual photo from way back when
My first experience with 3DCG
In 2006 when I was only about 7 or 8 years old I was taken to a school holiday programme with my friend at some kind of studio which made 3d art for film/tv or advertising (presumably). I have no idea which studio it was or who ran the programme but I wish I could thank them.
Over the two or so days we spent at the studio we where introduced to Blender 2.42. We where asked to bring USBs of at least 8MB so that they could send us home with the software - back in my day...
We built some skyscrapers out of scaled cubes and made a UFO from a squished cube with a turbosmooth(?) modifier - I remember keying the UFO to fly around the screen by pressing 'i' and selecting loc, rot, scale.
Sadly when I got home from the programme and tried to use blender at home it wouldn't work. (I had probably taken an .exe file home - my family only ever had Mac computers till I got my own windows rig in 2013).
Teenage Years
CoD 4
This is the game where I really dived into what a game was made out of. In year 9 (2011) everyone in our year was given Mac Books from the government, which where not very performant. I really enjoy winning every single match, so I learned everything I needed to know to host the most stable LAN matches every lunch (so I always got host advantage). This required learning at least a little more than all my mates about networking hardware & server configuration, and not only the 'server' configuration but the actual game rules themselves (gravity, acceleration, etc. Eventually I would come to host custom promod matches with our own rule set).
There is also an advantage to be had in the games physics engine at 125, 250 and 333 FPS due to it being a derivative of the Quake engine. This lead me to optimise so much of the graphics rendering using all kinds of console commands & config files. I learnt about billboards, overdraw, particles, lighting/shadow rendering, culling, texture compression. I even went so far as to make my computer run in 640x480 and kill as many non vital processes for the Mac operating system while running the CoD4 programme in the native 720p full-screen. I managed to reach 250 fps constant while aiming at the ground on an empty server & actually managed to get a STABLE 125 fps while hosting a 8 player promod match with my friends.
For context everyone else was getting between 20-40 fps. It was INSANE!
Then everyone else went about their lives and I kept optimising my performance alone.
Mapping/modding
Growing up I frequently would draw new maps for video games I played on bits of paper and imagine moving around them, at some point I realised I could actually make maps for some games which don't even have a 'skirmish editor' - It was then that my 3D imagination went ballistic, I spent a lot of time drawing and redrawing all of the maps that I planned to eventually make when I had the skills to make them.
Despite my best efforts, I never actually made (a working build of) any of these maps, though I think the drawings still exist in a binder somewhere.
For a time I was very interested in making mods for minecraft. I had a lot of success following tutorials for modifying my minecraft.jar file with other peoples mods, and I really wanted to write my own mods. However, I could never get anything to work. Lol.