If you’re going to watch these bare something in mind .. they are either extremely old, ie among the very first things I ever did in 3D or they’re just too old even for my folios, but I like them for nostalgic or cringe making reasons. I’ve dug these out from old optical discs, dat tapes, scsi drives a couple of Jaz drives and old cd’s. So they’re here as much for conservation as amusement.

The Spoils of War Part 2

This was one of three short films I’d planned back in 2002. At the time I was a character artist for Particle Systems and knew nothing at all about compositing or high end rendering techniques. Everything I’d ever put together had been direct from Lightwave; no layers, no comps, no separate effects. Everything was done in camera so to speak. I had no concept of mattes, thinking everything had to be rendered together or green-screened! Even CG! I worked out some of the rudiments of 2.5D matte painting but hadn’t figured out parallax issues. And while I could model game res and rough high res characters, creating a proper animatable mesh, building a rig, animating . .was way beyond me. Whats mind boggling is that that was only 8 years ago. It seems like another century. This was all rendered in Lightwave and comped in After Effects.

The Spoils of War Part 1

These are the beginnings of the first story about Joachim Bann, a German soldier, and his confrontation with the female crew of a T-34. All in lightwave, rendered in one pass. This was abandoned as I found a load of ray tracing bugs in Lightwave 6 that Newtek couldn’t sort out and I didn’t know enough about comping to be able to tackle another way. These days it would be so much easier.

I started work on a flash based website. The ActionScript has long vanished and all I’ve left are a few images.

Volcano

I can’t remember what this was for but it was something to do with the aftermath of a volcanic eruption in medieval times. Thats all I can tell you. The matte painting was by Steve and the rest by me.

Swamp Chicken

Look. I did warn you. I don’t remember what I was thinking at the time. I know a scene in Starwars, where the gungans ride out of a foggy swamp, inspired it, and I know the creature was copied from an Acclaim concept but honestly, thats all I’ll admit to I can remember.

Space Explosion

I bet after the swamp chicken you thought it could only get better .. well I’m sorry to disappoint. Yes this is dire although I really thought at the time that the explosion was as good as some I saw in Space:Above and Beyond and Bab 5. I was wrong. Look, I was relatively young and inexperienced. I did this at Acclaim because after a frustrating year of creating uninspiring cutscenes in an Excel spreadsheet I had to do something interesting. Luckily, shortly after this I went on to do the intro movie for Forsaken 2 ..

Forsaken 2

Well I was really happy to do this, my last job at Acclaim. This was done to be shown at E3 as part of the build up for Forsaken 2 but before it was even half way through they decided not to bother and just show a tech demo instead.

Dogfight

Hey!! Would you look at this! THIS is the animation that got me into the games industry! All the way back in the late 90’s. this was almost the first thing I’d ever done with Lightwave 4 and I’d bought Particle Storm especially for this.

The actual first things I did only survive as a few stills you can see below. Don’t be too harsh. The Lemmings 3D logo is the real deal. I don’t remember how I got the commission but that was a huge deal to me then.