Join us for an engaging conversation on CGCast featuring Neil Blevins, a seasoned CG artist with a rich history in both traditional and digital art, alongside Dennis. Neil shares his journey from early CG work in the late 80s to his current projects,
highlighting his unique blend of sci-fi aesthetics and hybrid 2D/3D techniques. Discussing his experiences at renowned studios like Pixar and Blur, Neil offers insights into the industry's workflow, challenges, and the evolving landscape of 3D software.
The episode delves into topics ranging from ergonomic challenges in long-term CG work to the saturation of CG films in the market, with Neil advocating for a balance between pushing creative boundaries and maintaining practical efficiency. Listeners
also get a glimpse into Neil's diverse interests, from his passion for traditional painting to his love for metal music, making for a well-rounded and entertaining episode that goes beyond just CG techniques.
This episode promises to be a valuable resource for aspiring and established CG artists, offering practical advice, industry insights, and a glimpse into the multifaceted life of a professional in the digital arts realm.
Welcome everybody to another episode of CGCast.
Today I'll be interviewing Neil Blevins and I have Dennis
with me to keep me company.
So Neil, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Sure. Well, I started off doing CG very, very, very long
time ago.
Back in the, I guess, late 80s, I really loved video games.
And I'm originally from Montreal in Canada.
and I did a whole lot of, it's not my pixel stuff,
because I did video game work back then.
This is just me and a couple of friends.
A friend who's a programmer liked programming stuff,
and I like making art.
And so the two of us got together,
and then years later, I discovered an actual 3D piece of
software,
which just blew my mind that you could make stuff inside of
3D.
I went ahead and bought it and started playing with it.
It was this program called Pauber,
and that sort of led me into doing the whole 3D.
Yeah, I enjoy doing sci-fi and weird alien landscapes and
big robots,
and I'm still doing that today.
That's cool.
So what type of work have you done so far?
Well, I've done a whole lot of different things.
When I was at Blur, where I worked a few years ago,
I did ride films and commercials and TV work and movies,
you know, video games, cinematics, a huge number of
different things.
Now I'm focusing on animated teachers.
And then in my own time, I do the equivalent of 3D
paintings.
I'm originally from a painting background.
So while I enjoy doing stuff that's animated or moving
around,
what I really enjoy doing is making beautiful images.
So I take the 3D tools that I have and I do the equivalent
of painting.
It's just it happens to be mostly done in 3D.
Although I've been branching out into doing more 2D stuff
on the computer these days
because the one thing about 3D is,
actually we were talking before,
it's not as immediate.
There's a lot of setup time to get something to happen,
but when you just sit down and start painting,
you can have something done pretty much way, way, way
faster,
and there's something really nice about that.
Yeah, that's true.
I noticed that there's a difference
between the 2D world and the 3D world.
The 2D world seems to have more feeling to it
than the 3D world.
Well, that's stuff that will eventually start
you know disappearing as time goes on but i mean that's
something that i've really been trying hard
at recently is trying to merge those if you look at my more
recent artwork i've been trying to
do stuff which is 2d 3d hybrid so you get you know some of
the grit and dirt and grime of the
real world and happy accidents but then at the same time
you get the the precision of the 3d work
so i think eventually you know stuff will start merging
together um i'm even attempting to do
stuff like one of the things about 2d that i really love is
is a standard way of painting
is paint in all the big forms first and then you refine
them slowly over the palette to make sure
that none of your image is at any higher level of
progression more than any other area of the image
so i'm trying to do the same with 3d to some extent as
opposed to building you know every
little tiny detail one thing and then bringing the scene
try to get the whole scene being worked
on simultaneously as I build it up.
So I think there's a lot of lessons from
2D art that 3D people
will learn and also
it's also just about the software.
The software is still very much in its
infancy and
I hope that in the future 3D software
becomes more immediate and
allows you to do things
like more
natural media type stuff. I hope so
too. How do you think the 3D
software will evolve? Do you think it will be
more like ZBrush-ish?
to some extent although hopefully it'll have more standard
interface um the it what i really hope is
going to happen is that software is going to become more
about the way you think as opposed
to taking the way you think and trying to change it based
on what the software can do so like one
thing i really would love is in your brain when you're
building something you sort of have an
inner dialogue in your brain of the instructions that you
are trying to do like i want to move
this box five you know centimeters over i want to grab this
space and i want to extrude it and
and some tools are like that but there's a lot of tools
that just don't happen in the same way that
you're thinking and you have to say it's like a translation
process it's like i'm thinking in
english but i have to translate into french to then talk to
the french person so it's sort of
the same thing where you're you're uh painting something in
english you have to then transfer
it into 3d studio max language and then tell 3d studio max
how to do it and it would be nicer if
the software would just kind of flow and do the things in
your own language,
which is a very complex UI problem.
And I think that's an area that I would really love
if the software guys spent more time on,
and that was really coming up with better ways of
interacting with the tools.
Because at this point, we basically have all the tools
that we need to do everything we want to do.
It's just that so many of them are cumbersome or difficult.
So I think at this point, it's more about refining the
tools
so that they do things in a more immediate way.
And ZBrush is a good example of the first stab at that,
which was quite revolutionary.
Now you have Mudbox and other programs
sort of headed in the same direction.
Or actually, I guess even before any of those stuff,
like Artisan Paint and Maya was a sort of similar deal.
I've never tried Maya.
What app do you use?
Because that was a good explanation you had,
but what's your background, actually?
As far as software goes?
Yeah.
Well, I started with Pavre, then I moved to 3D Studio DOS
back in like 94-something,
I can't remember just so long ago.
And I used 3D Studio all the way up until about four years
ago,
where I sort of split because I was using Maya a lot and
proprietary tools at Pixar,
but at home I still use 3D Studio because there's a lot of
really nice features it has that I really like.
And, I mean, when it comes down to it, most of the apps
these days are pretty similar to each other.
just to see little nuances that are different.
So there's a few things about Max that I really like
and really works well for the way I think.
And I would really, you know, love if other pieces of
software
had some similar stuff.
But everyone has their own opinion about how to go about
working.
And, you know, it's all cool.
Yeah, that's true.
There's a lot of Maya and Max wars going on.
Yeah, which I think is just so silly.
I mean, Maya is good at some things and Max isn't.
Max is good at some things that Maya isn't.
And ideally, neither of them are good.
You know, the ideal piece of software hasn't been created
yet.
They're both just trying to solve the problem in their own
way.
Especially after I started using other pieces of software,
it was actually really nice because it finally just, you
know,
showed me, hey, no piece of software, there's no reason to
have a war.
And if people are having a war over software,
it's just because, you know, they're angry people
and they want something, you know, a way to make themselves
feel more important.
I personally
use that kind of thing
yes
fanboys
they have way too much
free time
especially
the worst wars
are the Mac
versus PC
oh yeah
oh yeah
well
I mean
no actually
the worst wars
are you know
all the
you know
religious wars
have gone on
for the past
it's an extension
of that
it's like
you know
I'm different
than you
I hate you
because I'm
you know
yeah
yeah
like
if I
if I like
X thing
and you like
Y thing
we shouldn't fight
about it
Yep, definitely. I totally 100% agree.
And who knows, maybe in several thousand years,
the human race will get to that point,
but I guess we're not quite there yet.
Probably. I hope so.
I don't think we'll see that long.
We'll all be annihilated by ourselves.
Well, we can always hope, though.
I try to remain positive about it,
even though I'm realistic about the negatives.
The cockroaches will take over.
Yes, indeed.
No, by then, we'll have evolved into cockroaches.
Probably.
And back on topic,
You said you worked on proprietary software. Was it a big
change? Or is it very similar to take your own time to
adapt?
Not really. Back when I was in school, before I did a fine
arts degree, I did one year of computer science.
And I had a really good computer science teacher who
basically said, it takes you a weekend to learn a language
and a lifetime to perfect it.
And so his basic tenet was, I'm not going to teach you a
specific programming language.
I'm going to teach you the concepts that a programming
language has.
And then when you run into a new one, all you have to do is
say, okay, well, this language has blah, blah, blah.
It doesn't have blah, blah, blah.
And then the rest of it is all just figuring out, you know,
the syntax.
Or in the case of 3D software, it's about figuring out
where the buttons are that do the things we want it to do.
But I seem to, you know, be okay at learning new pieces of
software pretty quickly.
I try to remain more about the concepts and what you're
trying to do
and then try to figure out how to get the software to do
the thing that you're trying to do.
And I think that's a good way of really quickly learning a
new piece of software.
Do you have to switch much between different programs?
Oh, tremendously.
I jump between, I don't know, on the average day,
seven, eight, nine pieces of software, jumping back and
forth at host.
Wasn't that confusing with all the different settings?
Yes, tremendously.
That's why I really love pieces of software
that have more...
There's a certain UI standard for 3D software,
and I really wish that companies
would sort of approach it.
And many have.
I mean, like, you know, XSI, for example,
has sort of make my buttons closer to Maya,
and Modo has, you know, a lot of its stuff
that's very similar to Maya,
and Mudbox, the same thing.
Its controls are pretty similar.
And Mac and Maya's interface,
at least as far as navigation goes,
are almost identical.
to each other. So it's the software that is totally off the
map and have decided they're
going to reinvent, you know, how to do everything that is
difficult to use because they're never
used Blender, but you know, that might be the case. It's a
difficult thing though, because you
don't want to kill innovation. I mean, you want to do
things that are new and better, but at the
same time, there's certain things that, you know, that we,
that you learn from all these other
pieces of the software. And if you make your piece of
software so different that you have to totally
change you know everything about your your your mindset to
use it then that's going to be a really
difficult thing so it's it's you know it's like all of a
sudden saying okay well the mouse is
upside down if you use this piece of software it's like
well i'm not going to use that software
because i'm used to every other program does it this way or
another great example is in some apps
instead of the yes no cancel they have like cancel no yes
in like different spots and that
is insane because you're so used to hitting
no or yes in a certain spot
and when that changes, even if it's a
better way of doing it, it's something you're not
used to and you won't be used to it because
you're going to use all these other pieces of
software too that all do it a different way.
So there's some sort of happy medium between
conforming and innovating, but
I think a good piece of 3D software
really should go for that
in-between spot. Yeah, I agree.
That's why I love that Final Cut and Premiere
are so similar. We'll just have to
re-memorize the shortcuts.
Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, a lot of them
have the ability to change shortcuts, so they're
more similar to whatever it is you want to, you know,
forward you think.
So little cheat sheets on my monitor,
I have these little strips on the side which have a lot of
shortcuts that I keep forgetting.
Yeah, I have a trend of burning into your memory.
I have the manual of the final cut
with me in my school bag always.
Now it's like, yep.
The annoying thing on the Mac
is the Mac button. I don't see why they
has to have to replace the
control when the control does something else.
But anyways, I'm just going on.
That's what I like about Maya. You can make your own
small icons on the toolbar
and just use them instead of
using shortcuts.
Well, that is true. Although one
is a
issue, and it's a lot faster
to hit a button than it is to move your
mouse and
hit that icon.
Working in a big company, there's a lot of people who
have been in the industry now for 30 or
30 years. And a lot of them
have these really crazy setups because
their hands are in just so much pain that they can't
do the standard
stuff that we do because
they've just done it so long and their hands
are so messed up from it.
That's another thing in terms of the whole UI
thing. It's like, well, this UI might be fine for a while
but you need to make sure that you can do things
as efficiently as possible because otherwise
we're just going to be a mess.
Spend all our time in the hospital.
I didn't know it was that serious.
Oh, wow.
Some people, I know a few people who have actually left the
industry
because they're in so much pain, they can't do it anymore.
That's scary, actually.
Yep, definitely so.
So, you know, take lots of breaks, you know, do hand
exercises,
stand up, do yoga, whatever you need to do.
It's me, you know, working to make sure you keep going.
It's like an athlete.
I mean, you can only go so long, you know, doing the same
thing over and over
and over again if you don't stretch and prepare for what
you're doing.
But do they also get RSI from typing?
Yep.
Well, I mean, RSI is repetitive stress injury.
So it means anything you do repetitively,
if you do it enough, will eventually hurt you
no matter what it is that you're doing.
So there's a lot of ergonomic stuff you can do, though,
to try to alleviate that.
So the only thing is with keyboard shortcuts,
it's one button press or maybe one combination of a button
press
rather than moving your mouse up to a location
and then clicking on something.
So it tends to be a little bit better.
There's also different keyboards you can get, of course.
I'm sure you've seen those split keyboards, maybe even.
Yeah, I have one.
Or there's another person I saw as a keyboard that actually
has,
it's almost like you're reaching into two holes and all the
keys are in there.
The idea being that it makes the keys closer to your
fingers
so you can touch them faster without having to move them
around as much.
But do those ergonomic keyboards actually do anything?
Supposedly. I don't have one, so I don't have any personal
knowledge of that.
But I know some people who swear by them and say that, you
know, they're able to do things, that they're able to work
again.
Whereas if they use a regular keyboard, they're just in too
much pain to do so.
I think it's just the way your hands need to be positioned.
I think it's just the more positioned way of placing your
hands.
Also, depending on where your hands are, like if your hands
are up above a certain point on your body, that's bad.
If your hands are sort of at a certain level in relation to
where your hips are and where your legs are, you're able to
...
It's a more ergonomic position, which means you can work
longer and without as much pain.
There's an entire science behind this that I've only seen
little bits and pieces of.
But it's quite a complex problem.
Actually, when I came to Switzerland, a can of Dr. Pepper
exploded on my old keyboard.
And then my brother gave me his wireless ergonomic keyboard
.
And actually, I've never experienced any pain from using it
.
So I guess maybe it's good.
That's possible. Well, it's not something where if you just
use it too long at a certain time, it builds over age. I
mean, how old are you?
I'm 20. I've been using computers since I was 6.
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm 30. I've been using computers
probably since I was about 10 or so. But, you know, you're
talking people who have been using computers and they're
now in their, like, 50s. So it's a thing that builds over
time. So you're going to have to worry about it now, but at
some point, all of us are going to have to worry about it.
Well, maybe modern science has something to say about it.
Maybe not.
Yeah, exactly. Bionic fingers. I'm all there.
Actually, there's regeneration there. Searching
regeneration.
Yeah, no, those are very interesting topics. I hope that a
lot of that stuff succeeds.
Yes, I kind of have a secret desire to be Marcelo Gwynn.
That's the most logical way of doing it, regeneration.
Right. Yeah, that's a very complex moral issue right there.
There's nothing moral about it.
Well, I mean, if you live forever, and, you know, not
everyone lives forever, that's, you know, one big issue
that you're going to have to deal with.
If everyone lives forever, then all of a sudden, you know,
the planet overpopulates and we have to move to other
planets.
So everybody gets neutered from salt.
Gets neutered.
Yeah, well, that sucks for people who don't have kids.
That's something I'm actually going to, you know, be
looking into the next couple of years.
So, you know, it's an interesting continuation.
Good luck with your endeavors, the children.
Well, I have to get married first, but that's in the planning
.
How good are your endeavors in the marriage?
Women are tough.
Well, I managed to get a really good one.
I can hear that.
Don't worry.
It's all right.
Well, you've worked at two really cool studios, Blur and
Pixar.
Can you tell us a little bit about both of them?
Well, they're very different kinds of places in a lot of
respects.
A lot of it really just falls into sort of the big company
and small company differences.
like if you're in a small company we tend to do more on a
shot uh they tend to hire generalists
people who can do a lot of different tasks and when you
work at a big company things tend to be
a little bit more uh assembly line and they get a lot of
specialists so people are very good at
one specific you know the smaller thing um although there's
certain you know crossover i mean um i
work at a big company and while i do things that are more
specialized sometimes i also try to hop
around a lot and try to do you know a bunch of different
things so i might be modeling for
for several weeks or a month or something,
but then I try to hop over to do shading and whatnot.
So that's sort of one of the big things.
Another big thing is a lot of small companies
tend to rely more on off-the-shelf software,
whereas on bigger companies,
there tends to be more people who are pure programmers
who may not be able to paint or draw,
but who do program tools
or actually just program the graphics themselves.
So that's also a big difference between these companies.
And once again, as with everything,
there are advantages and disadvantages to both.
And the ideal, I think, is combining both systems.
So certain things are better done by hardcore programming
and certain things are better done by just a couple of
people's
off-the-shelf software banging through it.
And that's the ideal that I hope that we all can get to at
some point
because these movies are hard to make and they take a lot
of time.
And anything that we can do to speed up the process of
making something that looks really good and has a really
great story is a really important thing.
How did you get the job at Pixar?
I applied.
I sent a bunch of demo reels out and they called me and I
went in for an interview and I got hired.
What was the interview like?
The interview was a whole lot of smaller groups of people
over a period of time.
So over, I guess, like a three or four hour period, you
know, I'll show off the demo reel, I'll talk to the various
people who are working at the company. And it was actually
really nice. I mean, you know, Pixar is a very positive
place. And a lot of people are really, you know, they're
genuinely happy. It's not just, hey, we're gonna be happy
in front of the cameras.
It's, well, in the moment I got there, you just, this
really positive, positive vibe.
And it actually really helped in my interview because it
made me feel at ease.
And anytime you're in any interview situation, of course,
you know, you tend to get a little bit worried or scared
just because, you know, it's nervous going in and trying to
, you know, persuade somebody that they want you to work
there.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
There's like a lot of people that would kill to work at
Pixar.
Well, you know, it's a great company and we're always
looking for good people.
So, you know, just keep working and stuff.
But at the same time, you know, it's good to have
experience all over the place.
Like, I know a lot of people want to jump immediately from
school to the greatest job of all time, which, hey, you
know, I can't blame you.
But at the same time, you know, there's lots of other cool
stuff being done.
Sometimes you just need to get up in the industry.
You know, sometimes you just need to get working somewhere
and get, you know, your reel together so you can work at
some different place.
That's what I'm doing.
There we go.
Or, you know, sometimes it's also a matter of, you know,
certain companies, they're a great company to work at, but
they work in a very different way than the way you want to
work.
And maybe some other company is a better fit for you
because everyone likes to work in a different way.
And, you know, like maybe one company, you really need to
be a hardcore programmer to work there, but you don't
really find that interesting.
So even if you want to work at the company, you might
realize, well, maybe I'll work at this other company
instead because they do work closer to what I want to be
doing.
Your voice is kind of going down a bit.
Can you put the mic closer?
Yep, is that better?
Yeah, it's much better, thanks.
Okay, so what are your plans for the future?
Well, I'm probably going to stay over a map for the
immediate future.
I just bought a house, so that means I'm not going to be
moving anytime soon,
which is fine by me because I really like San Francisco.
But I have a lot of things planned.
I mean, I really enjoy doing CG features,
but at some point I would like to do some live-action stuff
.
At some point I might want to work in video games.
I love doing my own work and my own stuff,
although I don't know if I can find a way to make a living
at it
because it's a really difficult task to persuade somebody
else
whatever you want to do is something that they can't.
Anyway, the kind of stuff I like doing,
I don't know how commercially viable it is,
but I hope to do books with my work.
I'm selling prints now, which is really cool.
I found a really great company that makes these beautiful G
iClée prints.
The printing quality is great.
I'm so happy to finally find somebody who can do that kind
of stuff.
What's the website?
Probably a website, but I have to be in San Francisco.
I've already used them.
The biggest problem I always had with printing stuff
previously is,
well, the last time I tried printing stuff professionally
was five years ago.
A lot of the printers had the attitude of, you give me the
file, I hit print.
whatever comes out is what you get that's you know not
appropriate for doing our kind of work
because you want to say okay well you're printing it too
black you're printing it too light you need
more blue in there or something so i found a guy he was
willing to do a set of test prints for a
small price and then you know from there you adjust them
and you can do the final print so
i'm i'm more than happy that's weird because here i had to
print some stuff for school and
and the guy here i was printing with he was like if like
this the image was bad he'd print another
one for me blah blah blah it's weird that they would have such
an attitude like that over there you
know i ran into three different i tried two different
companies all three of them had the
abysmal attitude uh i mean i might be with the once
again that was five years ago uh or it could
just be you know could be a cultural thing i mean um you
know being in the in the u.s as opposed to
being in europe who knows but um i as i can i'm very happy
to no longer be in that situation i'm
getting some high-quality prints.
Awesome.
Which is nice.
Um, I don't know.
So what projects have you been working on at Epic Pastors?
Yeah, I'm starting to get really, really hot.
I'm kind of sick.
Oh, what do you got?
A flu.
Oh, yeah, that really sucks.
I had pneumonia a couple of months ago.
That really, really sucked.
How did you get that?
I had no idea.
It was just while I happened to attack the system.
Wow.
Visit your dentist every now and then.
That'll keep you some fun.
Well, I have really nice teeth,
so I don't have to worry about
never gotten a cavity of my life.
You're lucky.
Yeah, I'll keep my stickers crossed.
Knock on wood.
Yep, I got some right here.
So, no, I looked for the desk.
It's all perfect.
So, do you have, like, any interesting stories
that you have from the industry
from doing CG you'd like to share?
Interesting stories.
Well, I don't know. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy
stuff that happens. Although I think less crazy stuff
happens in the CG world than happens in the real world.
a guy who, he did makeup effects for 15 years,
and he just has so many stories about, you know,
going over to Thailand and, you know,
filming while standing, you know, up to his neck in water
for, you know, 12 hours and working on low-budget,
you know, Corman films and that kind of stuff.
So by comparison, I think most of the stories you have in
CG
aren't just, you know, not nearly as interesting
as most of your day has been sitting in front of a computer
.
So, like, I saw something funny on iTunes,
you know, or something like that.
But there must be some drama that goes on.
There's certainly drama that goes on,
but a lot of that you can't...
It would be impolite to talk about.
Well, too bad.
I'm sure a lot of people would like to know
what goes on behind the scenes.
It's not like what they show
and making everybody smile, modeling.
Look, I'm making this.
But what really goes on?
Well, I mean, a lot of it is just...
It's work.
I mean, you are given something.
You need to produce it,
and you need to produce it as quickly as possible.
So a lot of the day is, I mean, I don't think things are
radically different
in the industry than the way it's portrayed,
other than the fact that it's just a lot of hard work.
And there's a lot of time and energy has to be put into
doing things.
And sometimes, you know, a client will ask for something
in a really short period of time, and your company decides,
well, you know, we need this job.
And so even though it's really going to take, you know,
30 or 40 days to complete, we'll have to finish it in five
because that's all the money they have.
Yeah, well, I mean, that is one of the things, not so much
at Pixar, Pixar being its own deal to worry about this.
But when you're working for, you know, in the rest of the
industry, there's just a lot of overtime that has to be
done.
A lot of people spending tremendous amounts of time and
energy and a lot of it's unpaid, too.
So that's a big problem, I think, in the industry, because
if you're going to work, you know, 100 hour weeks, I think
you should be compensated for working 100 hour weeks.
And a lot of companies don't do that.
And part of it is because they just can't pay for it.
But the reason they can't pay for it is because they underb
id the project in order to get the project.
And I think that's a serious problem in the industry.
People who are underbidding stuff so that they get the
project,
but then they have to have their people work these
ridiculous number of hours.
And it's completely incompatible with having any sort of
lights outside of work.
Yeah, but it happens a lot, though.
There are a lot of companies that act the same way.
Oh, yeah? No, there's no question about it.
But it's a huge issue.
I mean, well, I'm sure you've seen there was a lot of
issues with that on certain big video game companies.
People talking about unions and that sort of possibility.
I don't know if a union would necessarily solve the problem
, but something definitely has to be done because the human
body can only work so long before it just can't work
anymore.
I mean, I'd hate to think the idea is, well, we work
everyone 100-hour weeks until they burn out, and then we
fire them, and then we hire a new student who's 20.
just coming out of school.
That's the way to, you know, do business,
if not from a business perspective,
certainly from a, you know, a moral perspective.
I mean, I'm 30.
I don't want to, you know, think that my best years are
gone.
Well, that's scary, actually.
Think about it.
Yeah, but it happens.
It does, but you just have to, you know,
take that into consideration,
whatever company you're working at.
I mean, ask the questions when you're in the interview.
I mean, a lot of advice when you're doing an interview
is they're going to ask you a lot of questions,
but you should ask a lot of questions about the company.
You should say, well, you know, I mean, at the same time,
you shouldn't say,
well, I'm only going to work 40 hours a week and that's
that,
because that's just not the reality of the situation.
If you're looking for the nine-to-five job, this is not the
kind of place for you to come in.
You shouldn't be, you know, abused.
I mean, you should make sure that you're doing something
which is okay,
whatever situation you're in.
I mean, I have a fiancée now, you know, I have a house,
I have all these outside activities.
At the end of a project, if I have to work 70 hours a week,
that's fine.
That's cool.
It's got to be finished off.
But you can't work every single week the 100 hours or else
you're not able to do it anymore.
Just burnout.
Speaking of all that underbidding and all these studios,
there's a lot of saturation of CG movies coming out.
Oh, yes, definitely.
Do you think that's harmful?
Well, it's harmful in the sense that a lot of them, you
know, aren't terribly good because, well, you know, there's
some people that want to make the films because they have a
story to tell.
And there's other people that want to make the films
because they're trying to make money.
And if you saturate the market with a whole lot of crap,
you know, it's not going to help anybody in the grand
scheme of things.
I mean, a couple of years ago, it was, you know, two or
three films a year.
You had Pixar, you had DreamWorks, you had Blue Sky that
came in with Ice Age.
Nowadays, well, just this past year, I think there's been
more than one a month coming out.
And I don't know if people want to, you know, number one, I
don't know if they want to see that many films.
And number two, I don't know if they want to see a film
just because it's CG.
I mean, my guess is no.
They want to see a film because it's a good film work, an
entertaining film work, because their kids are going to
like it.
But, you know, if you think that just by making a talking
animal,
you instantly will get every kid to love you,
it's like, no, that's not the way it works.
Yeah, how many talking animals can we take?
Yeah, exactly so.
Well, actually, I think the answer is, if it's a good film,
it doesn't matter if it's a talking animal.
But how many bad films as talking animals can we take?
No, but still, eventually, even if it's a good film,
there was like five talking animal films that came out
before it, past ones.
you're not really motivated to go see another fucking
animal film.
Right.
What you don't see a lot is that you have several movies on
the same subject.
This also applies for CG movies, like, for example, Over
the Hedge.
And there's another one called In the Wild or something.
It's something similar.
Let me see.
There was Toy Story, Small Soldiers.
There was the Bugs Life, Ants, Monsters, Inc., Shrek,
Finding Nemo, Shark Tale.
It was not really incredible, so.
I'm trying to think about that.
Well, I mean, I guess some of the CG humor films that came
out, but that's a little more of a yes.
It's been something that's gone a long time, though.
Before that, I mean, you had Volcano and Dante's Peak came
out the same year.
You had Mars Attacks and Independence Day.
How deep impact and armageddon?
Yeah, it just seems as though the same script is going
around Hollywood
and multiple people decide that they're going to do the
same thing
over and over again.
I mean, at our level, we don't really understand
who's making the decision to greenlight this stuff.
Although I have a couple of friends who are into writing
scripts
who might have some opinions on that.
But at the end of the day, all you can do from your
perspective
is try to make the very best film you can.
And an oversaturation of the market will certainly hurt you
in some respect.
But, I mean, what can you do about it?
You can't tell other companies and all that to make their
films.
So when it comes down to it, all you can do is just try to
do the very best thing you can
and try to do something that's original, as original as you
can.
But the timing is...
Yes, yes it is.
It was like a joke that the two studios say,
all right, we're both going to make a movie about Ant.
Let's see who has the best movie.
Well, I doubt it's that much of a conspiracy,
But I mean, there's obviously, you know, something strange
how that happens all the time.
I mean, ants, I believe, was mentioned after a bug's life,
but then they sped up the schedule so that they could get
it out first.
So, you know, it's all this big.
It's really difficult to know who came up with the idea
first.
Like I read an interview about the wild where they said,
well, actually, the wild idea came out long, long, long,
long before Madagascar.
But they just were able to finish film Madagascar faster,
which is why it came out.
So a lot of people thought the Wild stole its idea.
But, you know, it's like it was a guy from Iowa that went
up, from a Canadian.
Well, he's still a Canadian.
He went up and a core, I believe they were started as a
group to work on.
It was like William Shatner started the company or was one
of the investors or something like that.
Interesting.
William Shatner being another proud Canadian.
He actually was from Montreal, same town as I was.
yes the star wars guy and yes awesome sulu let's go now but
uh our uh one of the schools i went at
its student union building was actually called the william
chapman building because uh he actually
went to that school who knew he did so much oh yeah no he's
been uh he's been around wow but
he has cds he does this and that i just thought he was
famous for star wars i mean star trek
Star Trek.
Yeah, well, that was certainly what he was most famous for,
but with TJ Hooker.
Isn't he on Boston Legal or something now?
I don't watch the show, but I hear he's doing a real good
job on that
in the dramatic role, too, as opposed to the sci-fi things.
We don't get much TV here, so I don't know.
Yeah, I don't watch too much TV.
I don't have the time.
But I am addicted to Lost.
I've never seen it.
You've never seen Lost?
No.
I either recommend it when it comes out on DVD.
Actually, I guess that's a big deal with you guys is
obviously movies, certain movies come out over there,
a scene where they come out here and vice versa.
That's got to be sort of an interesting, you know, looking
at it from the outside.
Like, wow, all these people are talking online about this
great film that they all saw,
but we're not going to be able to see it for another like
months or something.
Normally, it's not so bad.
There's like a few weeks difference.
But the hard thing is trying not to watch the movie in
French by accident.
They took for the English versions with three subtitles in
three languages.
Right.
Yeah, I can imagine that being more complex.
Well, it wouldn't matter all that much to me, I suppose,
because I can speak French because I lived in Montreal.
No, but the thing is that when you watch a movie that's
dubbed in French,
they just completely wreck it.
Even the French people don't like to watch the movies
dubbed in French.
Right.
Yeah, I had a friend of mine who lived in Germany
and always said that the German translation of The Simpsons
was the worst translation he'd ever seen from any of the
characters.
No, not at all. It's horrible.
I tend to prefer to watch films in their original language,
wherever they are.
So if it's a Japanese film,
I tend to prefer the original language track,
but with, you know, subtitles underneath.
When Japanese shows, movies are awesome in Japanese.
If you watch it long enough,
like when you read the subtitles and you hear their voice,
it kind of like blends.
It's weird.
Yeah, well, if you watch enough films with subtitles,
it eventually just sort of becomes a natural thing
to look down at the bottom of the screen.
you feel like you understand what they're saying.
Somehow.
Well, and that's actually a great sign of,
certainly from an animation perspective.
I worked at Pixar and Monsters, Inc. was being played.
And I'd already seen the film,
but at the same time,
I didn't want to pay the $2 or something
for the headphones for lots of film.
So I was sort of just sitting there.
I watched the film and at certain points,
you can just sort of tell exactly what they're saying,
even though you're not hearing what they're saying.
And I think that's a sign of a great animation,
you know,
we have great animation when somebody is able to convey
exactly what they're
thinking without having to say a word.
And,
uh,
you know,
as far as animation goes,
the,
the,
the animators at Pixar are really good.
So I'm very,
very proud to be part of the company.
I'm sure.
Yeah,
I'm sure a lot of people are jealous.
Well,
just,
you know,
keep working on your own stuff and,
uh,
you know,
keep pushing forward.
I mean,
as I said,
I,
I,
you know,
people saw my original work when I first started.
It's like,
you know,
atrociously bad.
You should show us the now before.
The stuff, the original stuff.
Well, in Pabre, the very first 3D software I used,
the very first image I ever made was a fractal landscape
with a moon behind it and a gradient.
You know, that was cutting edge at the time to be able to
do that.
But nowadays, you know, it wouldn't pass muster.
But things have changed a lot.
I mean, I'm sort of happy with this vision.
This is sort of the spot I got in on the industry
because I got to watch a lot of things change.
You know, I started using computers
before there was a mouse,
which is...
So, you know, back in the earliest days,
it was all just programming.
It was all just, you know,
put the pixel here and that color, this color.
And it helps me understand, you know,
CG from a number of different angles,
which I kind of like.
That must have been hard to do something
by just programming it.
Well, I mean, you find tricks.
Like, you get a piece of graph paper
And then you would draw what you wanted to draw.
And then you'd sort of color in the dots, you know, that
you would want.
And then you'd, so then when you were typing stuff in, you
'd be typing the coordinates
because you're looking at your little diagram that you drew
separately.
So, and then the mouse got, you know, popularized.
And that was amazing because you could just click in the
area you wanted.
They would, you know, paint whatever color you wanted.
And that was, that was a fantastic revolutionary thing.
And now we're at a point where you get programs like Pain
ter or Photoshop or ArtRage, which I haven't played with yet
, but I've seen some cool stuff with.
And it's a whole different world, being able to paint in
some more traditional way, but on the computer where you
have wonderful features like Undo and things like that.
That Undo is magical.
Oh, it totally is.
But what if a painter makes a mistake?
Do they just paint white, paint it white over it?
that it dry and just paint white when you start over?
Well, you generally just paint...
Well, it depends on the kind of paint. I mean,
I do acrylic tainting, and
the one nice thing about acrylics is you can layer.
So if you paint something you don't like,
you just paint over it with whatever it is
that you do want. You don't have to
break it down. But then
there's other kinds. I mean, like watercolor,
to a certain extent, you can remove some
watercolor, but if you can start with inks,
whatever you've made is what you've
made, and so you have
to rely on the happy accidents.
If you really mess something up, you can only do so much.
You know, there's little tricks you can do, like you can
take razor blades and remove a little of the paper and then
paint over top.
But you can generally see the result of that afterwards.
So a lot of it is just you got to be very careful and you
got to start, you know, very lightly and build your colors
over a period of time.
And I mean, that's a whole different world.
And it's a really great world.
And I will never stop, you know, drawing in real life and
painting in real life.
There's just so many advantages from a ski perspective and
also from a look perspective.
There's a lot of things we do in digital, but you just can
't do painting in the real media,
much the same as things in the real media.
It's a lot of fun.
I've been doing a lot of painting recently in Photoshop and
some extent in Painter,
and it's been a load of fun.
Have you tried Painter?
Is it easier to paint in Painter or Photoshop?
Totally depends what you're doing.
Photoshop is better at manipulating things, I feel,
and Painter is better at doing real media.
So if you want to make something look a little more like it
was actually painted,
Painter is just awesome.
If you want to make something that's a little bit more
technical,
then Photoshop is usually better.
And Painter can read PSD files.
So a lot of the time, a lot of people go back and forth.
Like if you ever look at some of the Ryan Church DVDs, for
example,
the Noman DVDs or whatnot,
him and a lot of other people, they go back and forth in
programs a lot,
depending on using the advantages of each program.
Plus, Painter has this really great feature which allows
you to rotate your canvas non-destructively just in the
view.
Because when you're drawing a straight line, the human hand
generally only has a 30 or 40 degree area where drawing a
straight line is easiest.
And then after that, drawing a straight line becomes more
and more difficult.
So it's easier if you draw something in real life, you have
a piece of paper and you twist the paper around when you're
drawing straight lines.
So to not be able to do that digitally is kind of bad.
So Painter has a feature which lets you rotate the paper
just so you can draw a straight line in whatever direction
it is and then rotate it back really quickly without doing
any actual pixel manipulation like you would in Photoshop.
Okay, I'll try Painter because I've tried painting in
Photoshop and it feels miserable.
You know?
I tried to go at it like it was real paint.
Right.
It didn't work so well.
Do you do traditional painting or have you done traditional
painting?
I've done a bit, but I haven't done any in a long, long
time.
Well, I mean, Painter is closer to the traditional media
than Photoshop is.
But then there's a lot of cool stuff that Photoshop can do.
Well, give it a shot.
I mean, you know, it's always good to try new pieces of
software.
And you can figure out painter pretty quickly.
It took me about a weekend to, you know, figure out how the
program works.
And of course, it would take me a lifetime to perfect it
like anything else.
it's always perfecting it that's hard yeah it'll take a
while it's just a process i mean you know
a lot of it is just sitting down and just doing it over and
over and over again and eventually
paintings will get better and better i mean yeah that there
's some sort of magic formula like what
is the thing i need to do in order to make sure that my
images look great you know uh right off
the bat and it's like well no you just have to keep working
at it and then eventually you know
if you love doing it enough and if you keep practicing it
up yeah you'll get better at it
you just will um it's so much about it as being obsessed
about it and being you know interested
in doing it and just doing it a whole lot and there's you
know tricks you can use to do things
faster here and there but a lot of it is just to to do what
you have to do and there's no you know
magic oh if i take this course to you know i can start from
zero in two months be good enough work
you know this really crazy amazing company actually yeah
that's how i started out i was
like hey how do you make metal oh yeah do these things and
then you have metal all right nice
and then you find out that none of those methods really
work you have to find your own way
of creating a material that you like actually uh some
courses are cool because me i know photoshop
well i've done a lot of things with it but um at the
beginning of the year we had this really
intense crash course in Photoshop
where they would teach us some really advanced
stuff. I learned a lot
of really interesting things and they gave us
a crash course in Illustrator.
I've never used Illustrator
before, but now after that
one day, I can
make illustrations and stuff.
Certainly not.
But it still takes a long time to
perfect whatever craft it is
you're trying to do. Plus, one of the
nice things about Illustrator is a lot of it are
very similar tools to Photoshop. So once you know
one piece of software, you can move over pretty quickly.
Although I never liked the spline tools in the Illustrator.
I know it seems kind of ridiculous and backwards,
but a lot of times when I'm doing splines,
I'll actually do them to max.
Yeah, me too.
Because I really love just their interface
for dealing with the Bezier splines
and all that kind of stuff.
And then I'll just render it from a top perspective.
I have all these scripts I wrote,
which speeds up the process
for rendering those kind of things out.
Really? Could you send them to me?
Because I did all my graphics and homework
in 3D Studio Max because I just could not handle illust
rators with their thing.
And seeing your 2D illustration in 3D is actually much
cooler.
Well, they're actually already available.
Some of those scripts are part of the Blur scripts,
which were some scripts I wrote while I was working at Blur
,
which are available on my website.
And some of them might also be part of the new Soulbird
scripts,
which after I left Blur, I had other scripts I wanted to do
when I had improvements on scripts I wanted to make and
whatnot.
So I branched out because I was no longer working at Blur,
so it didn't make much sense to keep working on Blur
scripts.
Not to mention, you know, contractually,
that would mean I was doing freelance,
which, you know, is not a good thing.
That's cool. I thought I was the only person doing that.
Nope. It's all kinds of people doing all kinds of different
ways.
So at least I know I'm not crazy.
Actually, my teacher really liked it.
I had done one illustration of graphism homework in 3D Max,
and she really dug it.
Cool.
Maybe you should make a tutorial about it.
Maybe I should.
Although, most of it's just the tools itself.
Once you learn the Max tools for doing that kind of thing,
it's all pretty straightforward from there.
But I'll put that on the list.
I have a big list of tutorials I want to make,
and eventually I get around to making them,
but there's only so much free time during the day.
Well, would it be considered technically a vector?
because you could render it at whatever resolution you want
, right?
Yep. I know it's exactly the same thing.
The only difference is you sort of have to turn the 3D view
into a 2D view.
So you have to make a camera which is directly above with
no perspective.
You need to turn it into an orthogonal camera, a bunch of
stuff like that.
Although there's certainly a lot of wonderful experiments
you could do with 2D stuff,
and then a 3D camera flying around it.
I mean, there's been a lot of push over the past number of
years
to make things look as photoreal as possible.
And I'm really excited about the idea of doing stuff that's
not nearly as photoreal.
I mean, if we need to do photoreal, we can do photoreal.
That's been proven.
I guess we'll ask the same thing, being the absolute
perfect photoreal human.
But a lot of what I'm more interested in is doing stuff
that could only be done on a computer.
It's like, if you're going to do a human, why don't you
just film a real human,
as opposed to maybe a perfect CG human?
Which, you know, some people, that's cool, and it helps
push forward the industry, so, you know, go at it.
But personally, I'm just not as interested in doing that
myself.
That's one of the reasons I like the Incredibles characters
, because I felt that they were believable, but at the same
time, they were very stylized.
And I thought that that was a really cool kind of take on
the subject, rather than endorse for something that looked
absolutely human.
Yeah, that's true. I agree 100%.
I want to experiment in cel-shading, but the cliche self-
shade looks very dumb.
Not dumb, but looks very bad.
Well, I mean, it's also its own sort of thing.
I mean, do you want to take your computer and make it look
like something that was actually done internationally,
or do you want to take your computer and try something that
only the computer could do?
Yeah, I kind of found the effect.
I heard somebody talking about something
and I tried to implement it.
I actually made the lines 3D
and it's kind of looking good.
It looks cel-shaded,
but it still looks 3D at the same time.
Right.
So I want to get that perfect balance in the middle.
Sure.
That sounds really cool.
There's last year's Oscar short films.
There was some really cool ones.
There was such a variety.
It was really nice to see.
You know, you had one film that was all very low-tech 2D
type stuff,
and another film that was almost all silhouettes.
What was it called?
I forget what it was called, but it was all these black sil
houettes
with these multi-textured backgrounds.
So I thought that was really a cool effect to do the film.
And it really worked with the film because it was a sort of
steampunk,
big mechanical machine spewing out tons of, you know, like
industrialized England,
but now all of a sudden you're in the sci-fi world kind of
stuff.
And so I think it's really cool when somebody comes up with
a new aesthetic, which works well with whatever story they
did.
Video for a broken social scene, Almost Crimes, because the
entire thing is a silhouette.
Ah, I haven't seen it.
I watch very cheap music videos, but then again, I also
listen to very little popular music.
Actually, it's not popular at all.
Oh, really?
What style?
It's kind of weird indie style. I'm not really sure what it
's considered.
Okay, because I'm a big metalhead, so I actually listen to
crazy stuff.
Ah, then you're like dense.
Oh.
Is Dennis even still here?
Yeah, I'm here.
I thought you'd be excited that you have another metalhead.
I like to make fun of Dennis because of his metalhead.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
What kind of bands do you listen to, Dennis?
On Telecom mostly.
Some Finnish bands.
Soil, Soilwork.
Okay.
Demi Borgir.
Right.
I don't know.
A lot of bands.
Gotcha.
Yeah, I'm a big death metal fanatic.
So, you know, Suffocation, Cryptopsy, Origin, those kind of
guys.
Meshuggah?
Yeah, Meshuggah.
Actually, I did an album cover for the guitar player for M
eshuggah
for the side project that he was doing.
That was kind of cool.
Yeah, Meshuggah were great.
They just reinvented.
Well, they obviously took stuff from other people
and sort of turned it into their own thing,
but they created a whole genre of music,
you know, a sub-genre of metal, which is really impressive.
And I really loved their music when I first heard it,
way back when they were doing the Contradictions Collapse
stuff,
and they're not yet TV, which was spectacular.
Exactly. I like the fact that they made a whole album on
one song,
and later on, on a new album, they just cut them up in
different songs,
but they were all still connected.
And yeah, I don't know, I found it very, very interesting.
I really liked Fred Ferdendal's special defects,
where he had the one long song,
which was sort of multiple pieces.
Although I kind of like it, the original one,
as opposed to the remixed one,
which was all just one big track.
You know, it's a big 50-minute tune on my iPod.
Isn't it called One or I?
No, no.
That was the Meshuggah song that they did.
But this was a separate one,
that came out years before,
I guess back in the mid-90s.
I, more recent, like 2003, 2004.
Oh, pretty cool, pretty cool.
So I guess that would be the end of the show.
All the music and music talk for the end.
Right, a little musical interlude.
Just to break it up a little bit, you know, people guessing
.
We talk about geology, music, everything except for CG.
We missed the whole CG thing.
I think we got a couple of CG things.
Yeah, we got a bit.
It's fun to add, you know, so you don't get oversaturated
with CG.
Yeah, well, I think it's a good thing, too,
that have a lot of different areas of interest.
I mean, if you spend all your time
sitting in front of the computer doing only CG,
then at some point you're just going to get
really burned out doing it.
And you need to be obsessed about it,
but at the same time you need to go out and see things
and, you know, get inspired.
I mean, I really love nature.
I spend a lot of time wandering around, you know,
doing hikes and whatnot.
You just see these beautiful things and you're like,
wow, you know, that's a really cool shape.
If only that were big and giant and robotic
I can add lots of tentacles and teeth.
That would make it even cooler.
And then, you know, you draw the whole thing quickly,
and you go home, and, you know, a couple weeks later,
you have yourself a finished image.
So there's a lot of things to be inspired about in the
world.
It's hard to recreate the world
when you don't know what it looks like.
Yeah, definitely so.
And, well, it's also just hard to, you know, be inspired.
All you see is, you know, all your images
are going to end up looking like computer screens,
because that's all you look at.
Look, empty gaps.
So if you have an overview in your head
of what something needs to look like,
then it'll automatically fill it in
and try to blend it with
the real world. Yeah, to some extent.
And also it's good a lot to reference. I have a huge
number of reference books and such for
every topic imaginable.
And images, a whole
full of images on my hard drive
about every topic you can possibly imagine.
So if somebody's like,
I need to blah blah blah, I just pull it out
and see what the real thing is before you go
and try to replicate it.
I'm a big believer in looking at, you know, really
observing something before you try to then make something
look just like it.
Back in the early days, you know, I would make something
based off just sort of what
I thought something looked like, but it never seemed to
quite work out.
So things seemed to work a lot better when I actually took
a real good amount of time
staring at something first and then, you know, breaking it
down.
What are the 10 things that make this object look like this
object?
And then try to replicate that in CG.
That's good advice.
A lot of my tutorials are like that on my website.
It's all about, like, the material tutorials especially.
I've been trying to, at the very top of each tutorial,
say, okay, well, here's this material.
Here are the five things that make this material look like
this material.
And then here's how you might want to go and try to
replicate this
using, you know, various pieces of software.
And also they're general enough that people using all kinds
of different software,
you know, can do it.
Because there's a lot of options these days.
I mean, even if you're just Max, you can render with Scan
line render,
you can render with Brazil, you know, V-Ray.
E-Ray.
Mental Ray, which is now built in.
So there's... If you try to make things
as general as possible, and hopefully
there's a larger group of people
that'll be able to take the concepts
from it and figure out in their
particular favorite renderer
or software how to do what needs to be done.
Yeah. I've used
your tutorials quite a bit.
Oh, cool. Well, they helped
the learning process.
I'm glad you found them useful.
Yeah. Actually, before, when I was learning,
I didn't even have internet at those times,
so I used to go to a cyber cafe,
and I would bring a CD.
They would just search for a bunch of tutorials and save them
and then just do them at home.
Bring it back.
Yeah, the internet really had revolutionized
being able to do a lot of this stuff
because there's just so many resources out there
for people to look into.
Back when I started, the internet was still in its infancy,
so I was on CompuServe back before there was
the more general
world wide web
became popular
and it just
expanded from there
I mean
it's very difficult
for me to do work
without having
the internet present
because there's
just so many times
where I'll want to
look up something
or you know
find more reference
images or
I can't figure out
how to do something
so I go
you know
to a forum
and ask a question
or something like that
yeah
I agree
I become very
unproductive
if I don't have
the internet
yeah
but at the same time
you also have to
avoid spending
all your time
looking stuff up
sometimes you just gotta sit down and do the work
and the only thing I usually implement for is to create
or to look up
reference pictures for something I need
to recreate
so many of them
it's pretty rare that I need to look up stuff
more to happen to fail it again
or I just need more specific reference on some very
obscure thing that I want to try to do
I've been working to reference
wires and tentacles
as my personal artwork shows
I tend to like that kind of stuff
Yeah, the front page of your website is the big monster.
Yeah, that's true.
But how's the alternate birth image on it?
Actually, a friend of mine just bought a print of that,
and he was going to hang up in his bathroom,
which I thought was great, but eventually degraded the
image.
Not because it's scary.
Well, I think that's what makes it more fun.
It's like you're about to go to the bathroom,
and all of a sudden you see this big organic wharf spitting
forth these wires.
I think it would be kind of disturbing if you had amusement
at the same time.
I tend to find humor in things that are a little bit, you
know, strange and disturbing.
Mighty, my friend in question, is a huge horror film fan.
He looks at that kind of stuff.
I do too, but not nearly as much as him.
You know, he's got all the t-shirts from all the major, you
know, horror films throughout the years and whatnot.
He's a real fanatic.
That he is.
So you said you worked on some 2D stuff in the past.
Did you work on actual games like friend well-known games
like Simon the Sorcerer or and it's those two the adventure
games
No, all of the the 2d stuff I did was all based on this
video game that I was planning on making and bear did
So I never actually got into the game world. Although the
game world is so much different now
They was back then. I mean, I I
Grew up during the you know Street Fighter 2 Mortal Kombat
The good days.
Yeah, the teenage days.
Everything is 3D, and that's cool.
I mean, 3D is nice for games,
but at the same time, there's a part of me
that sort of also likes playing those older games,
which were more 2D from the side,
people on double dragon type stuff.
But the funniest thing is that the older games
are usually the nicest to play.
I used to play games a lot more back in those days
than I do now.
For some reason, games are not really that interesting
right now.
Yeah, they get boring.
Very certain games.
Yeah, maybe we're just getting spoiled graphics.
Well, I mean, maybe it's a little bit like Mookie.
The best graphics in the world aren't going to help a bad
story,
and the best graphics in the world aren't going to help bad
gameplay.
I think there's a lot of people who might be going after
the shiny Apple,
you know, more than thinking about, well, how are you going
to interact with the game,
and how does that work?
There have been a few really good video games recently,
though,
that I got into. Blur was
a huge Quake company, so
I played a lot of
Quake when I was there. Quake 3,
primarily, although Quake 2 at the very beginning.
And Halo is
a really great game. I really like the original
Halo. On the computer, mind you,
I never really got into the controller
on the Xbox for Duel of the World.
So I can't wait until Halo 2
eventually comes out on the regular computer
so I can play it. Are you looking forward
to Vista? Oh,
And what does this do?
It does this behavior, too.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's interesting to know.
Well, I mean, it's been a long time since I've been on XP,
so it'd be probably kind of nice to move on to a new
operating system.
I am really excited about going 64-bit,
although I have to wait until all the software I want to
use
has a 64-bit version to really take advantage of that.
But it seems like the past five years,
we've been stuck at this 2-gig limit for RAM,
and I want to finally go past that and not have to worry
quite as much about,
you know, can I really render this displacement
at this high resolution because it might
crash. Yeah, I know that's a horrible feeling.
Yeah, well, it seems like it's been a big
stagnant point where
like 2 gigs has sort of been the limit.
You know, and there's some things, tricks for doing
3 gigs and whatnot, but 2 gigs has sort of
standardly been the limit for RAM for a very long
time. I mean, back when I first joined
Blur like 7 or 8 years ago,
most of our machines were 2 gig, you know,
machines, and now it's still the same
story. So it's going to be really nice to finally
get 128 gigs of RAM
or something like that.
I can render stuff at 8K.
The RAM prices are going to go sky high.
Well, I don't know.
Back in the day, again, I used to spend
$1,500 on
one gig of RAM
in the earliest days.
I think it's pretty inexpensive now in comparison.
But it's all relative, actually.
Yeah. It'll be the same
story in the future.
Would you leave more
in order to keep up with everybody else?
well that's the economics right there's a price point that
people are willing to pay for something
and if no matter what it is you can't do it you know the
new geo if you remember that video game
console but that came out at the same time as the genesis
and this you know super nintendo and
whatnot and it was it went after the market of well our you
know games are going to be 500 each
but they're going to be the best games you've ever played
and they got a certain amount of market
share but they eventually went away because it's just
people you know aren't willing to spend that
kind of money, no matter how good a game is.
Actually, their games were really good. Yeah, I know they
really got into the fighting game thing after a while.
Every fighting game
imaginable, they just had so many different characters.
They had King of Fighters, Last Blade,
all those cool games. Yeah.
Was there World of Fighters or World
of... No, King of Fighters. I don't know.
There was another one which had the word
world in it. I forget. I played it a couple of times.
I didn't like the fact that their arcade
games were exactly the same as their home.
Yeah, exactly.
You could choose $500 or $0.25.
cents. Yeah.
Back when video games were $0.25.
Seemed like everything is a dollar.
The arcades.
Yeah, I mean, the arcades were $0.25
you could play for around.
Well, in the youth day of arcades,
pretty much the only video games in arcades
are the games you cannot play at home.
So the stuff like the driving games
and the whole big box.
Some of the sports games are really popular,
which is not so much into the sports stuff,
but more to the action, adventure,
you know, fighting kind of stuff.
It's not a lot of that in arcades anymore.
And there's not many arcades anymore, which is kind of a
shame.
Yeah, people growing up now are not going to have the same
experience
that when I grew up.
There's a funny story.
One time I was in an arcade with my friend,
and these two guys were playing a football game.
And there was a kid against this older guy,
and the kid was beating the older guy's ass in the football
game.
And the older guy, like, attacked the kid, man.
And he was like, no, I'll get it alone.
I want to play by myself.
And then he prayed.
In real life?
Yeah, I attacked him,
he glabbed,
and then they were fighting,
and like,
the sheets were moving,
and I didn't notice,
I was there busy playing
like,
Modern Wars Capcom 2,
and then my friend
is calling to me,
hey, watch out,
because the guys
were coming in my direction,
had to move,
and the security guard
came with a shotgun
and tell them to separate.
Good lord.
You know,
it's just the game,
it's meant for fun.
I mean,
I understand about
being competitive and all,
and certainly
after the Quake games
at Blur,
it was, you know,
angry,
but you can't go
and turn into
a real live fight.
I know,
And that thing was an older guy attacking a younger kid.
Yeah, that's the same thing.
I mean, when you're on the internet or you're playing a
video game,
everyone's equal.
But in the real world, if you're six foot tall
and you're fighting somebody who's four feet tall,
that's not fair.
That's not worth fighting for anyway.
Yeah, well, that's...
The levels can get a little...
You know, the breath times come back.
And then if you're still annoyed,
then do something about it.
But just no reason to beat somebody up over a video game.
And kids are missing all that excitement.
Because you can't...
The excitement of getting beaten up by older men.
You can't.
Like in an arcade, you can't go to
a few noobs
to their face and get away with it.
Like they do on the internet.
You have to watch what you say.
Yeah, definitely so.
Yeah, that's one of the big problems of the internet
is the fact that because everyone's anonymous,
everyone can be, you know,
a raging asshole.
So you want to be.
And it's like ruining it for all the people
who just want to, you know, learn new things
and try different stuff.
Exactly.
And it's the whole, I really hate trolls.
And I, it's really difficult if somebody is, you know,
being annoying to not fall into the, the, the habit of, you
know, trying to receive them.
Because when it comes down to it, if somebody is angry and
somebody is going to, you know, want to be right, they're
going to be right.
And they're just going to keep attacking.
And there's just no reason to argue, even argue with it
because there's just no way it's going to do any good.
But it doesn't stop you.
You still want to somehow, you know, persuade the person
that what they're doing as well.
Yeah, that's human nature.
Yep, yeah, that definitely it is.
So have you actually worked on any games in the past?
No, I've not worked on any real games that ever got sold.
That was going to be my next question.
How much the workflow differs from a game development
company
and the company you work at right now?
Well, I have a lot of friends who work in...
There is a big difference, but I have a lot of friends
who work at game companies.
I mean, there is a big difference, but at the same time, a
lot of what you're doing is the same thing.
It just requires you to sort of meet a different set of
expectations, you know.
It's like, you know, low poly modeling.
The tools are pretty much identical.
It's just when you're working on a CG film, you have
different specifications on what your model can be than
when you're working on a video game, you know.
So it's something that's totally learnable.
I think it's interesting.
And as I said, maybe at some point I'd like to go give it a
shot.
Yeah. So when you're doing high poly modeling for a movie
or whatever,
are you still bound to limits like poly counts or texture
sizes?
Totally. I mean, you just have to think of scale.
I mean, if you have one object that is really expensive,
well, that's fine.
But remember, there's a team of 30 other people who are all
building objects.
And at some point, they're all going to get put into a
scene or in polygons.
And that's not going to render because you just can't
render it.
So I spent a lot of my time to ensure that my stuff is very
optimized.
I mean, as optimized as it can be to have the level of
detail that you need on the final image.
But Blur trained me very well on that because people were
very conscientious of Blur,
trying to make sure things were as, you know, inexpensive
polygon-wise as possible.
So I learned those lessons and I try to apply it for
everything I do.
Because if you can get the same effects, you know, as if
you can achieve the same final look,
but with less polygons, it's always going to help,
especially if you have a scene with a whole lot of stuff in
.
Yeah, but I think it also depends on how important the
object is.
Is it going to be in the picture all the time?
Is it going to be in the background?
Is it a small object or a big object?
I mean, that's...
And that's one of the things sometimes when you're dealing
with a big film
is that if you're only doing modeling, you're sometimes
removed,
so you don't know how close you're going to get to an
object
or you don't know where it's going to be in frame.
All you know is that you've been handed a piece of paper
and told to build it.
And then sometimes things change too.
Like sometimes an object will be far up in the background,
but then a director sees the object and says, that's great.
I want it now to be, you know, full screen at 2K.
And, you know, you're like, I didn't build it so you could
see it that close.
And you got to go back and remodel it.
Don't they normally like show you the storyboard before?
Oh yeah. I mean, there's a certain amount of that,
but things change all the time.
I mean, if you waited for the storyboards to be absolutely
100% finished
before you model anything, that just doesn't happen,
no matter what company you work at or where things are
going.
So you have some idea of what's going to happen,
but things reappear later on in films that you wouldn't
have even imagined.
And a scene that you worked on might show up later on in
the film.
At the last minute, they say, to get the story across,
we really need another scene in the set.
And then all of a sudden, your set is being scrutinized a
lot more.
So personally, I tend to be of the opinion that the best
route
is to try to make stuff as cheap as possible for what it is
.
Later on, if you need to plus something up,
then you should plus something up
rather than building everything to, you know,
so that you can look at it at 100% view.
But, you know, there's different,
there are pluses and minuses to that.
If you do that, you have to make sure there's time
at the end of the schedule to go out and plus out things.
So you have to finish a little bit earlier
so that you have that time later on to go back
and fix things up if something is holding up.
Oh, that's pretty cool.
I always thought that they always had the storyboards
finished
before they started the production.
Well, I mean, to some extent,
but things are constantly changing and evolving.
Things are never 100% ever in any particular department.
I mean, even though it's assembly line,
it's not assembly line like every single stage is 100% done
before the next person gets in.
You just can't do it that way.
Plus, people get different ideas.
Sometimes the director will look at something that's far
along
and say, oh, wow, if only I had done this,
it would be even better.
and then they look at the budget and decide whether or not
they can afford to go back and change things.
I mean, it's like making a painting.
You have an idea of what you want to do when you're making
the painting,
but along the way, while you're painting the painting,
you get new ideas and better ideas and things you want to
try out.
It's exactly the same way from a production.
It's not like you know exactly what you're going to get
before you actually start working on it.
Yeah, that changed my perspective of how it's done.
Well, so far we've been recording for one hour and 12
minutes,
so I think it's time to wrap it up.
Okay. Well, thank you, Bream, for the opportunity to talk
to everybody.
And I haven't bored you with stories of non-CG-related
stuff.
No, it's all good. It's all good.
We have to variate the things.
So do you have any last comments, anything you want to say?
Well, I'm just, you know, thank you to everybody who's
visited my site.
and I get a lot of really great feedback about my tutorials
about my artwork and all the stuff
I do and I just
you know I'm really a bear who are interested
in the kind of stuff that you do
and you know
just work hard and you know
follow your dreams and whatever part of the industry
you want to be in and doing whatever you want to do
you know just work at it and you'll get to
where you need to be. Awesome. Amen.
There we go.
Alright. Good night everybody.
Yo. See you later. Later.
