Hello, internet! Welcome to my professional blog. I'm Brendan. I make rigs and animate them, mostly for games. I also create tools for other 3D artists - right now, mostly for Maya. In this post, I'll try to provide a brief overview of my background and how I got to where I am.
I always liked to write. Stories, mostly - fantasy stories. When I was much younger, I thought that's what I wanted my life's pursuit to be. What happened? I became interested in other media, particularly visual. In exploring my own development, I think it would be hard to overstate the impact of starting to come of age during the early days of broadband internet. The booms of webcomics, flash cartoons & online games drew me towards those methods of storytelling. I started to draw and get into comics, and my stories changed a bit to fit the new format. An interesting thing about shifting a story to a new medium is the opportunity for dialogue between the new dimensions and the old. In shifting to comics, the visual aesthetic of the places in my stories - the cities, the human spaces - suddenly had to become explicit. They demanded attention and thought - and that attention invariably resulted in subtle changes to the backstory, to the world itself. I studied architecture for awhile to get a solid foundation for this kind of design. It taught me how to create style within fiction - to avoid monolithic style, to think of style as more connected to characters or cultures than to the story or the world. And it taught me how to borrow from history more purposefully. All stories do, whether they know it or not. You'd better know it, and do it with intention.
I should note that during this whole time, I played video games. Immersion-rich games. There are different ways to create immersion, but the kind of immersion I really care about I'll define like so: you are a character in a world. If it doesn't sound like a tough criterion, then try putting more stress on the italics until it does. Some games create immersion with a gripping story. That's awesome - but are you the character? In Uncharted, you're not. You just Mr. Magoo your way through beautifully designed levels and shoot stuff; then you get up for a soda when some guy named Drake takes over for cut scenes. Other games create immersion with scarcely any character at all - they rely on a game world of breathtaking size and depth. Among others, good MMOs do this. I'm not certain I can consider most MMO avatars to be characters in a narrative sense, but there's no doubt that the player inhabits them completely.
I lament that 3D animation, to me, seemed so insular. Halfway through undergrad, I was scarcely even aware of programs like Maya and the world of 3D animation. I ended up graduating with an interesting combination of topics in my head - art & art history, architecture, vector calculus, linear algebra, computer science, and, of course, creative writing. This hodgepodge may sound familiar to fellow tech artists and game devs.
Soon afterwards, an old friend mentioned he had been getting involved in 3D modelling. I was interested, and asked him to show me. That first day, I made a Batman in blender. I'm sure the edge flow was terrible. But it was enough to get me hooked - I looked up classes in Seattle that focused on 3D animation with the most common studio tools - Maya or Max. What I ended up in was a year-long series of courses taught by Jason MacCoy, Myk Sanders and Sean Hewitt. We covered the fundamentals of everything needed to create an individual short film. Here's what I ended up with (the music came later):
God, it looks so rough now. But it was a grind to the last minute to get it done by the deadline.
After finishing that class, I dove into scripting with MEL and began my focus on the technical aspects of Maya. More on that in the next post.