Week 9: Article Reviews
I remember back in 2000 and 2001 when I was first getting into 3D, Truespace was one of the first 3D programs I ever heard of. It was too expensive for me when I first looked into it. I remember that it was originally owned by a company called Calgari. I was interested in it because it was the preferred program for making models for one of my favorite games. I never figured out how to get my own models into that game, but I did as much research as I could manage. After about version 6, they started offering version 3.5 for free. I downloaded it, but wasn’t persistent enough to understand it. I hope that the coders for the project can get it into open source. It is terrible that a company like Microsoft can buy the code and just throw it away. If it is going to be thrown away, why can’t it be made open source. It looks like you can still go to their website and download the software, at this point it is free. It looks like it is still good software, but I fear that it will be dying soon, so learning this software might be a bad time investment.
CGTextures.com- along with a few other free digital art resources
This website has proven to be incredibly useful in my work. I am impressed at the selection and quality of images on this site. I am always happy to find people out there providing quality resources for artists for the sake of art, not for money. I hope to contribute to this site and others like it in the future. There is another great image site called imageafter.com, it has a smaller, but equally high quality collection of images. Often when I don’t find something on CGtextures, I find it on ImageAfter. Another site in this spirit is freesound.org, this is a site in the spirit of open source, providing quality sounds for art projects. I have used it for several school projects and I plan on using it in the future. I will post any other really useful digital art resource repositories as I find and explore them.
I have been told by a few people that this place is an excellent site to post my work. It looks like I can put up a free still portfolio of my work on this site. I need to get all of my good work online as soon as possible, my portfolio is my employability, if it isn’t updated, I am not employable in the world of 3D. There is a lot of scary competition out there, I need to learn from that, but not dwell on it. This site is populated with some of the best work I have ever seen and I have a lot of learning and growing to get to the point that some of the art on this site is at. I am going to focus on making a good modeling reel first. The new 3D modeling teacher suggests a realistic human, animal, and prop (such as a vehicle) and then a stylized version of each of those categories. I hope to get my portfolio online by early June.
