Voyage towards 3D

I saw a computer for the first time at a friend's place when I was eight. It was an Apple Macintosh computer. I was not interested in using it, rather I was interested to understand how it works. It is great to see a device that can do so many things. Even now, when I see games and various applications, I always wonder how
it works. When I was young I wanted to be a "Game Programmer". I still do not know where I picked that title. But I always wanted to be one.

I got exposed to programming when I was in 9th grade. I learned C and was so interested that I used to make tiny cool apps in a 286 machine that we had at school. We used to make animation, windows and even drawing apps during those years. But it was just after my tenth grade my interest went towards animation and graphic designing  on computers.

I started to use Macromedia Flash. Even though it was a trial app ,it was a great start. I learned a lot from it. I learned about the complete package from help files and tutorials you find over the internet. I started making small games and animations by the end of my high school.

And then I joined college , where I started designing posters and stuff. And for the very first time, I wanted to make something good for a poster(for our department). My department's name is AEI. Which stands for Applied Electronics and Instrumentation. I made a simple logo and an idea for an animation(during those boring classes). So I teamed up with one(Kiran-who knew 3d) of my cool friends. The concept was to show the logo with a simple animation. Just to convey the way I thought about it. And yes the final logo need to come on a poster.

This was the first iteration of the logo. Where the animation would be like this. The letter 'E' would just project out when the word 'expand' is displayed. Then the letter 'I' is projected when word 'in' is displayed. And then the letter 'A' is projected to show the word 'All'. Finally all the letters will project out together making a corner of a three dimensional space. And the word 'dimensions' is displayed. And so it would look like AEI with a tag line "Expand in all dimensions"

During this creation, I explored many 3d applications and got familiar with all standard applications(Maya, 3dMax , Modo , Silo , Rhino , Blender , Wings3D, Zbrush). Yes, Zbrush is the best application out there for an artist. But you need to pay lots of money or crack the application. But for me the best application for modelling has always been Wings3d. Its a free application and is very easy to learn and work. It is the best, if you don't have a Wacom tablet. That being said, I haven't used blender extensively after B-Mesh(for N-gon modelling) was introduced. I believe it has now the feature set of Wings3d (in terms of modelling). And Blender has all that is required for 3d modelling , rigging , surfacing , lighting , sculpting , animation, rendering , compositing. It's an all in one app. I will discuss about the things I know as well as the things I learn thru my blog. I discovered and used blender from a SUSE distribution(thanks to another friend - Antony).

Following are some of my old models done in Blender3d.