Reply To: How you got into cg

[Mike Z]

I tried 3DS Max in the 90s but couldn’t get it to do a single thing. I tried Blender, no success. Years later, I was managing 3D artists who used Maya to create models and videos for Hasbro and Verizon. We put together some amazing animations for marketing on the first GI Joe movie and first Transformers movie and so much more. I was so envious of their ability to create all of that, that I tried Blender and failed. I tried it again years later and failed again. I scraped and scrapped together YouTube tutorials to learn. I took a week and just watched Lynda tutorials. Finally I found a small series on the basics on YouTube that helped me learn the software.

I kept returning to the basics and watched how people did similar things in different ways. I tried not to get too ambitious but couldn’t get past the initial beginner level. I was stuck. I couldn’t create anything I wanted and felt anything I tried to do, ended up looking all messed up.

Finally, I decided I should get serious when my company got a large gaming project and I took it as an opportunity to learn 3D so I could help out my 3D artists. CG Cookie took me from novice to professional and the game turned out great.

I then gave myself a 20 day challenge to create one model per day, that took an hour or two. Sometimes it went over but I tried to keep it around 2 at most. That challenge put me over the top and increased my confidence exponentially. It was hard but forced me to practice and to explore different things. Get out of your comfort zone or you’ll never change.

Now, I mostly use Blender to create game assets in Unreal Engine 4 and since my background is in programming I have almost everything I need to create these from scratch. I credit a lot of that to this website since that’s exactly the areas they cover these days. That’s led me to not only create more games, but to also teach 3D game development (using Unreal Engine 4) at the local university as an adjunct professor.

Coincidence, but today is my 2 year anniversary on CG Cookie! I just checked. Thanks guys for everything!