A:M Nostalgia/old projects

[Michael Brennan]

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 

[Michael Brennan]

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.
 

[Michael Brennan]

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.

[Fuchur]

Just amazing Mike, just amazing.

1998 is even before I started with A:M (first verison was 8.0 / 2000 for me) when I was a teenager.
You already created amazing stuff :).

Really great to see that.

Best regards
*Fuchur*

[Roger]

Thanks for sharing your work with us, it is always nice to see what other people are working on.  

[Michael Brennan]

16 hours ago, Fuchur said:

Just amazing Mike, just amazing.

1998 is even before I started with A:M (first verison was 8.0 / 2000 for me) when I was a teenager.
You already created amazing stuff :).

Really great to see that.

Best regards
*Fuchur*

 

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

[Michael Brennan]

14 hours ago, Roger said:

Thanks for sharing your work with us, it is always nice to see what other people are working on.  

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

 

[Michael Brennan]

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.

 

[Fuchur]

5 hours ago, Michael Brennan said:

 

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

I actually started with a software called "Monzoom 3d / Pro" from Oberland Computer. That was a small company which I found a software package in a department store from when I was 14 or something like that. (roundabout 1998)
A couple of years later they went bankrupt and gave out a small broschure for reasonable priced 3d software alternatives to their customers with some smaller deals in there.
(it still is available here for free download nowadays, but of cause very old today: https://www.geoxis.de/monzoom/downloads.htm)

There was a deal for Maxon's Cinema4d "light" and a couple of other software... one was Martin Hash's Animation:Master which I especially liked because most other software back then was not aimed at character animation which Monzoom lagged too, while A:M was pretty much focused on that. And that is how I came to A:M.
Later I used 3ds and XSI (at work) too, but nothing came close to the ease of use of A:M and so I stayed.

I created a couple of animations for work (because they saw how fast I could create stuff with it ;)), in my studies and my diplom thesis and of cause a lot of different smaller and bigger work for fun.

Best regards
*Fuchur*

 

[Michael Brennan]

58 minutes ago, Fuchur said:

I actually started with a software called "Monzoom 3d / Pro" from Oberland Computer. That was a small company which I found a software package in a department store from when I was 14 or something like that. (roundabout 1998)
A couple of years later they went bankrupt and gave out a small broschure for reasonable priced 3d software alternatives to their customers with some smaller deals in there.
(it still is available here for free download nowadays, but of cause very old today: https://www.geoxis.de/monzoom/downloads.htm)

There was a deal for Maxon's Cinema4d "light" and a couple of other software... one was Martin Hash's Animation:Master which I especially liked because most other software back then was not aimed at character animation which Monzoom lagged too, while A:M was pretty much focused on that. And that is how I came to A:M.
Later I used 3ds and XSI (at work) too, but nothing came close to the ease of use of A:M and so I stayed.

I created a couple of animations for work (because they saw how fast I could create stuff with it ;)), in my studies and my diplom thesis and of cause a lot of different smaller and bigger work for fun.

Best regards
*Fuchur*

 

 

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.

[threedslider]

Thanks for sharing @Michael Brennan !!

[robcat2075]

Those are fine-looking pieces, Michael! They would have been great 25 years ago and they are still great today!

I really like that blue hippopota-something. He should get animated and have some new adventures.

v4 was where I came in. Ouch. After you made a model, you had to cut it into separate "segments" and then piece it back together in the Bone module to rig it.

 

I'm jealous of you guys having A:M in high school. When I was in high school I sort of knew what computer graphics might become because I had seen imitations of it in movies like "2001" but there were no home computers back then.

In high school we had  occasional access to a computer via a terminal that connected by a 10 baud modem to a "time-shared" computer that existed in some other city. We wrote little math programs in BASIC and stored them on paper tape.

Each school got billed for the minutes of computer time it used. I recall there was a minor scandal when one kid wrote a program that ate up seven hours of computer time.

Ten years later, the whole home computer scene had arrived. I had my AMIGA computer and I'd wait seven hours for one frame of a 3D ray-traced animation to render.

[Shankill]

I love the look of your ray tracing image, it reminds me of The Mind's Eye animation compilations. They used to play clips of it on YTV here in Canada and it's what got me interested in 3D animation.

[Michael Brennan]

On 3/13/2025 at 1:10 PM, threedslider said:

Thanks for sharing @Michael Brennan !!

my pleasure

[Michael Brennan]

On 3/13/2025 at 1:24 PM, robcat2075 said:

Those are fine-looking pieces, Michael! They would have been great 25 years ago and they are still great today!

I really like that blue hippopota-something. He should get animated and have some new adventures.

v4 was where I came in. Ouch. After you made a model, you had to cut it into separate "segments" and then piece it back together in the Bone module to rig it.

 

I'm jealous of you guys having A:M in high school. When I was in high school I sort of knew what computer graphics might become because I had seen imitations of it in movies like "2001" but there were no home computers back then.

In high school we had  occasional access to a computer via a terminal that connected by a 10 baud modem to a "time-shared" computer that existed in some other city. We wrote little math programs in BASIC and stored them on paper tape.

Each school got billed for the minutes of computer time it used. I recall there was a minor scandal when one kid wrote a program that ate up seven hours of computer time.

Ten years later, the whole home computer scene had arrived. I had my AMIGA computer and I'd wait seven hours for one frame of a 3D ray-traced animation to render.

 

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" 😀

[Michael Brennan]

8 hours ago, Shankill said:

I love the look of your ray tracing image, it reminds me of The Mind's Eye animation compilations. They used to play clips of it on YTV here in Canada and it's what got me interested in 3D animation.

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

 

[robcat2075]

11 minutes ago, Michael Brennan said:

"In my day it took a whole day to render a single frame of animation at 320x240 pixels" 😀

320x240 is indeed what it was most of the time.

[Michael Brennan]

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

[Michael Brennan]

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!

 

 

 

[Roger]

Wow!  Very cool.   I can remember seeing that box on display back in the late 90s at the local Best Buy

 

[Michael Brennan]

14 hours ago, Roger said:

Wow!  Very cool.   I can remember seeing that box on display back in the late 90s at the local Best Buy

 

Thanks Roger!  :D

[Shelton]

Mike

 

very cool stuff!!!   I love seeing the vintage stuff.  And you have been busy on YouTube.  Keep it up

 

 

[Michael Brennan]

20 hours ago, Shelton said:

Mike

 

very cool stuff!!!   I love seeing the vintage stuff.  And you have been busy on YouTube.  Keep it up

 

 

 

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

[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.