For our May, 2024, Artist of the Month we have chosen radioham, known to his friends and family as Ian McMullan.

If his name sounds a little Irish, it is! He was born and lives in Northern Ireland and has lived some of the tough experiences that sometimes go with that background, but even before he was born, he was part of a chilling experience. Not long before he was born, his mother was told by her doctors that her baby would be stillborn. When the heart-wrenching day arrived, to everyone’s amazement, he was born healthy and happy!    

He grew up with a love of music since the age of thirteen, playing with bands in the 60s, which led to moving into computers. Then happily, he discovered the world of 3D graphic designing. We asked him to share some thoughts about his interest in the technical art.

What got you interested in jumping into 3D graphic artistry?  

I got into the world of CG via the Amiga 1000 so very long ago. The programs were quite simple. You could do so very little with them. They could walk and run after a bit but that was about all.

Then came the power of the PC 286, a big jump forwards. I remember one program called, Animation, that came on six CD disks with loads of back grounds, loads of pre-set figures to place in the 2D plane and a few short animation files.

Then while doing music files on the BBC32 with the Music 500 add on in a studio, I saw the king of all animation programs running the "3D Studio." This was a DOS only program, but it was good. By today’s program standards slow, very slow overnight renders, but I don't think that anything today comes close to what it could do. Now hard drives of one TB had yet to be made so to save the work the company used what was called A PVR which was just a name for a store recorder that ran 24 hours a day.  Yes, I did muck about on the program on my down time from work but boy it was hard to work.

At the same time, there was a computer event in London mostly for video editing, but there was a lot of demo going on. One of which hit me hard when they showed a few minutes of the making of the effects of the TV show, Babylon 5, a great Sci-Fi show. All the effects on it were done with the Amiga 1000. Granted, if I remember right, there was a room with 30 of these computers making the effects. I never did find out the name of the program they used.

What are your favorite topics?

At this time, I am doing a lot of my work on having more than one set of movements going at the same time. I know about these non-movement figures that you can set up in an image render, but they don't do anything for me.

I am also working on the parting of the waters type animation. Based somewhat on that old movie, Moses and the Red Sea.

It is not just the opening of the waters, but looking up at the walls of water way above their heads. When you remember that movie think of when it was made…boy is that great!

What are your favorite tools to work with now?

In making my images and animation I use DAZ 3D, Poser 11 pro and Carrara 8.5 Pro. I have a few others but don’t use them a lot, and the mighty Blender program to render from them... Sometimes if it is from DAZ and I am only going to make a single image, I would use the DAZ to Blender Bridge to move it into Blender.

But if I want to make animations up, I tend to use the FBX to port them into Blender. I find that if I want more than one set of movements at the same time, this works for me. The DAZ bridge does not allow me to move animation files in to Blender. It tends to jerk it all over the place.

In Blender I would render both the 2D and 3D renders.

What tips do you have for those who are just getting started in 3D designs?

One tip that I would give to all those out there who want to go down the same path, in both Poser and DAZ if you use the full dressed version of a figure, you may not be able to change the color on the clothes within Blender. What I do is load the nude figure and put the clothes and hair on, then if in DAZ, fit each of them in turn...in Poser you use the confirm to figure command then you can change the colors as you need.