Tuesday 13 June 2006

Tron Scherzo

The release of PIXAR's Cars has prompted me to reprint an article that I wrote, for my online portfolio, a few years ago.

An interest and appreciation of CGI began, like many of my contemporaries, with watching the movies 'Tron' (1982), 'The Last Starfighter' (1984) and playing video games at arcades and on consoles - from the Atari VCS CX2600 to Sega Genesis/Mega Drive - in the 1980s.

In the summer of 2000 I began reading 3Dworld. The inclusion of Bryce, a 3-D landscape generation application, reignited further self development within this flourishing arena.

Off-the-shelf software, such as the Academy Award®-winning Maya and Shake, had developed to the point where many of the DTP (Desk Top Publishing) skills for fine art and graphic design can now be successfully transferred to a 3D context without exhaustingly steep learning curves! The artist can now focus on issues of composition - colour, movement through the frame et al - without trying to reconcile with an alienating UI (User Interface).

Alias' decision to provide Personal Learning Editions (PLE) of Maya and now MotionBuilder (from its purchase of Kaydara) is fostering consumer loyalty. Using their free FBX Converter I'm now able to import older projects into Alias applications for future enhancement. The FBX SDK will be worth investigating.

This is a sample collection of original 3-Dimensional images created using Bryce, Corel Photo-Paint, Maya 6 PLE, Painter and Poser (and retouched in Photoshop).

Now you can add Google SketchUp to the Mac OS X application honor roll!

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