Career Blog Part 2
By mtmckinley 4 Comments
Year -0 (continued)
When I was a senior in highschool, and was preparing for college, my heart was still set on somehow learning this computer graphics stuff. I managed to convince my parents that I needed a computer for college and it'd be a big help to get it early so that I could get the hang of it. I got this HUGE CRT 21" screen monitor that must have weighed 100 pounds and my first PC, which might've been something like a Pentium 2 400 mhz or something with a whopping 256 mb of RAM! All for the low low price of around $4k. Yeah, that was nuts.Anyway, I started doing research... not into colleges or anything like that, but into finding 3D graphics programs! I finally managed to find a free demo version of a program called Bryce3D.
Here's what the interface looked like: http://www.your3dsource.com/bryce-3d-screenshot.jpeg
It was primarily known for being good at generating height maps and landscapes. I started fiddling with it and started playing with creating shapes and shaders. Nothing complicated in the slightest. I'm talking about merely plopping down cubes, tori, spheres, etc. and making simple scenes with them. I couldn't save my files and when I rendered an image, it would render the image through a scan line and at the last second add a huge watermark all over the image. I got around this by taking a quick screen shot of the rendered image just before it hit 100% and saving my own jpg images that way.
Long story short, and to kinda get this narrative back on track, after a couple months of dabbling with Bryce3D, I made a few (very) simple scenes that I was proud of and made a rudimentary website where I posted them up.
Don't ask me how, but somehow, someone found them, noticed that I had mentioned that I was going to be moving to Arizona for college, and contacted me about the possibility of a job.
So, right out of the gate, I was getting interest and I was on cloud 9! Turns out that he was a headhunter and there was a small startup software company in Arizona that was looking for cheap talent. It wasn't games, but it was working with 3D, so I was excited!