Michael Brennan

It's cool to hear other peoples stories, all roads lead to A:M! I played around with Bryce and Poser, but the novelty wore off when needed something other than a procedural landscape with clouds and water. 😜

In 2002, my friend Paul and I started our own 3D animation studio using the old office that Streamline Media originally occupied. It was one of the most exciting yet stressful times of my life I never thought keeping a sleeping bag in the office closet would be a good idea until then. We were trying many things to promote the studio, Focus Chaos Inc. so I submitted my Valentine's Hash image contest entry to 3D World magazine and then completely forgot about it. It wasn’t until our friend Steve, who rented us the office came in one day and told me he saw my image in a magazine at the bookstore! I still have a copy of the magazine, 3D World May 2002.

I tried Ray Dream Studio 5 recently for the nostalgia of it and it made me realize why I was so happy to find A:M. just moving the camera around alone was so tedious.

Thanks Robert! Guess we all have our strengths, I've never been good at making tutorials or explaining things for fear of going off on a tangent, playing with features for hours before getting back to what I was trying to explain.

Also some old animations created while at Streamline Media. A website header and an animation for a touch screen console. converted to animated gifs so has a bit of dithering.

Thanks Roger, Yeah maybe Radiosity is overrated, we were able to render some decent things without it back in the day.

Some more A:M product renders and graphics created while I worked at Streamline Media.

Thank you Fuchur, The first one was lit with the Yves Light Rig.

In the early 2000s, I was working with my friend Paul and his roommate, also named Paul at his web design company called Streamline Media. It was a fun little place to work filled with multimedia artists, sound engineers and programmers. We did our fair share of 3D work for websites and print. One of our bigger clients was a local company that made CNC router tables. I had the opportunity to model and sometimes animate their tables using A:M. It wasn't until they asked if we could import some of their CAD files that I realized I needed to start learning a polygon modeler like LightWave 3D. That took me down a different path for a few years. Here are some renders I did for the CNC tables using A:M

Great work Steve, Look forward to seeing more.

The Oakville Waterfront Festival poster design for 1999. Reusing the models from the previous year made things quicker but looking back wish I took more time to clean things up, making the models a little less lumpy. Was a fun project nonetheless,

Here is the project file, Made probably using A:M 98 or 99 so some textures don't look 100 percent when opened in V19.5 feel free to pick apart and use the models as you like. swamp_demon.zip

Hi Tim, I'll look through my old stuff to see if I still have the model for this guy. If I find anything I'll share it here.

Thanks Tim!

Some progress renders of the creepy Swamp Demon guy. 😱

Very cool, didn't know A:M was so good at rendering toon lines especially the varied line thicknes.

Thank you Roger, He is a creepy guy, I have some other scary renders of him I should dig up.

The Hash Image contests were always exciting events to witness and partake in. I submitted to my fair share around the 2000's and was a runner up in the April 1999 Horror theme with my Swamp Demon character. (totally inspired by Meg Mucklebones from the movie Legend) Shortly after the contest I received an email from Jeff Paries asking if he could use my model for one of his tutorials. It then appeared in his next book The Animation:Master 2000 handbook. Seriously what an honor!

Thank you Lee, nice to hear my work is appreciated I had that collection of Hildebrandt cards decorating my cubical when I was taking Illustration!

Thanks Roger! I agree with you about A:M not getting the press.

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!