Michael Brennan

One of the places I used to frequent most on the Hash website, besides the gallery sections was the "A:M Users" area. They did a great job making it feel like a community of 3D artists. In 1999, I connected with Paul Sterling through A:M Users after seeing that he was based in Oakville where I was living at the time. We chatted via email a few times, and when we decided to meet for coffee realized we lived literally five minutes away each other! We were both graduates of the Illustration program at Sheridan College, and like many college grads stuck around the city where we had studied for a while. Paul was working on pitching an animated series based on a script his friend had written and asked if I was interested in helping out. It was called "Guardian Force" Unfortunately, it never got off the ground partly because Paul started a web design company with his roommate, where I ended up working for the next few years creating 3d graphics and animations using A:M. With the help of the Wayback Machine, I was able to look back to when Paul and I had our websites linked to the A:M Users pages.

Nice work David! Reminds me of the lunch rooms at the office and just as empty with everyone working from home.

Thank you Steve! Hope to be posting more on YouTube in a few weeks

Thanks Roger! :D

Probably the most exciting project I worked on while at my teacher's studio (around 1998/99) was the package design for the ATI Rage Fury video card. I remember hearing they wanted to incorporate an eye-shaped ship created by another animation studio, but we got to design the main character, a sexy cyborg girl with a glowing sword. How cool is that! After modeling the character in A:M, I experimented with a few poses until we settled on the render below followed by further edits in Photoshop for the final packaging. At the studio, they had a storage closet for supplies, as well as a collection of old manuals and software boxes. To this day I still think about some of the marketing slogans printed on those boxes. One was for Electric Image (EAIS) which said: "Render Fast, Retire Young!" That was so cool. Another package had the slogan: "Dream, Create, Astound." One of the best marketing lines a software company could use to inspire an artist!

When I started working at my teacher's studio in Toronto, I was introduced to other designers and it didn't take long before I was commissioned to help with their side projects, making 3D illustrations. I finally had the opportunity to do some book illustration (modeling and rendering an action figure in A:M 98) which was used on the back cover of a novel by Jim Munroe. The front cover had already been designed by another artist using Alias Sketch. Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask published in 1999

We were probably watching the same compilations, I watched YTV all the time for inspiration

Thank you Robert!! Wowzers, I didn't know computing power was so sparse back in the day that you needed to connect to one via a terminal. It used to be when people talked about the old days they would say " I had to walk 10 miles to school, uphill both ways in a snow storm" now it's more like "In my day it took a whole day to render a single frame of animation at 320x240 pixels" 😀

my pleasure

Very impressive list of applications Would be interested in seeing screen shots and renders that your renderer makes. 🤩

Ah That was too bad Monzoom 3d went out of business, it looked like a promising application.. the interface reminds me of Truespace 3d a little. I'm happy A:M has kept going after all these years, you are right Gerald not many applications have come close to the ease of use of A:M.

Back when I was finishing college, a friend from high school started his own web design company. He pitched the idea of creating an online poker game and came to me to create some graphics for it. The game was going to have a top-down view of the poker table, but I still wanted to create everything in 3D. I had just started modeling some of the players before the project got canceled but I was still able to reuse some assets for later projects.

Thanks Roger!! I probably should of shared these things earlier... like 27 years earlier guess better late than never

Thank you Fuchur!! Did you start with A:M when you got into 3d or use other 3d programs?

I was nearing the end of my third and final year in Illustration when my teacher approached me with a volunteer assignment outside the usual class projects. In Oakville, there was a summer festival that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s called the Oakville Waterfront Festival. It was a major event at the time, featuring live music, games, food, and craft shows. The previous year, my teacher’s studio had illustrated the festival poster, which featured a 3D rendering of an ice cream cone. Having seen what I was capable of modeling in A:M, he asked for my help in creating a 3D version of the festival’s beloved mascot, "Jake from the Lake." Over the next few weeks, I modeled Jake and his buddy, Fishy, and the rest is history. Below, you can see a screenshot of the final poster, along with the Photoshop revisions my teacher made, including the addition of the ice cream cone from the previous year. It was such an exciting time I had never seen my work in print like that before. The poster was displayed all over the city, featured in newspaper articles, and even printed large scale for bus shelter ads.