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 he was based in Oakville where I was living at the time. We chatted via email 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 continued to live in the city. 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. 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.

Initially, I wanted to pursue illustration to become a book illustrator. Some of my favorite artists at the time were fantasy illustrators like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, the Hildebrandt Brothers, and Keith Parkinson. I thought studying interpretive illustration would set me on the right path, but I found that many illustration teachers in the ’90s were jaded about the industry’s direction. With Photoshop taking over many traditional illustration jobs, photographers could now do work that had once been the domain of illustrators. Maybe that’s why computer class was one of my favorites, the teachers were excited and enthusiastic about this new field. Many of the skills I learned in those classes, like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, are tools I still use today. This was one of my projects for computer class. I believe the assignment was to create something using Photoshop, and of course, I used it as an excuse to do something in A:M, using Photoshop mainly for creating textures and final touch-ups. I was also experimenting with achieving soft shadows in ray tracing by creating a small cluster of bulb lights.

Lately, I've been seeing some posts on here and on other forums showing vintage CG stuff, it got me looking through some of my old projects, reminiscing about my first experiences with 3D and starting my career in 3D graphics. I figured maybe this is a good space to share some old works that I never posted on the forum before maybe some of you will recognize some of the stuff. I got into 3D in the early to mid-'90s in high school and college. I didn't quite understand how 3D graphics were made in high school and used programs like DeluxePaint Animation to try and create my own. I even did a few projects for teachers, animating the high school logo. Then, I eventually learned about POV-Ray and tried every free 3D modeler available at the time that worked with it but it was never satisfying. I eventually started using 3ds for DOS and was able to get somewhere. I used it to create a 3D gallery for my uncle’s website, showcasing his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. I switched to Ray Dream Designer but it wasn't until college that I found out about Martin Hash's 3D Animation Pro, or A:M 4.0. With A:M, I was able to model organic shapes that I had been struggling to make in other programs. I used A:M for my computer class projects while taking Illustration at Sheridan College and because of what I was able to do with it got hired by my computer teacher at his design studio in Toronto. Below is one of the first projects I did for my computer class using A:M 4.0 I'll be posting more as I sort through my files

Happy Pre-Christmas Fuchur, Beautiful Work!

Thanks David!

Thanks Pierrotsc and Tom!

Getting in the spirit of Halloween, so played around with an older model and some lighting.

Sounds like a Fantastic idea! Brotherhood of the Spline Cheers

You're Welcome!

Hi Tim, Attached is a project file with the same lighting, just replaced the models with some objects from the library, most of the settings you will be looking for will be in the Choreography/Radiosity and Global Ambiance Type. Cheers 🍻 WickerBench_Lighting.prj

Thanks for posting Ken, worthy of bookmarking for future use! I was driving home the other night and spent a few blocks driving behind a delivery truck. was fascinated with the aged textures of the trucks back door, it was painted metal with lots of paint chipping, scratches and the metal was dinged in areas. It just made me think of a book on texturing for 3d I saw years ago, in the book they said a good texture tells a story, an object gets it's dings and scrapes because it's been dropped or banged into.. or left out to rust.. These AI texture tools can be helpful to think about those stories and add more realism to our models.