Ever since early childhood I have been fascinated by Fantasy and Sci-Fi – let it be stories, movies or computer games. Something highly unusual during that time (1985 …), considering that I am a female and those things were mostly the turf of nerdy boys with skin issues.
One could say Mr. J. R. R.Tolkien (his books) and Richard Garriott (Ultima Series) won me over for the more mature and darker fantasy stories when I was around 7 years old. Child stories didn’t do it for me, anymore
I miss those good old times. Back then, most games only existed in English – and if there was a German version, the translation had been so horrid that I rather sat there with a dictionary in my hands than suffering through weird sentences structures. So it was for me both a learning experience and an adventure I still haven’t returned from and hopefully never will.
Being a creative soul, I loved to write stories or entertain my friends during weekend evening-parties with spooky horror stories I made up on the fly.
Art also has been one of my favourite Hobbies, though, after more than 16 years of practicing traditional painting and pencil drawing I gave up my attempt on Character and Clothing Design. It never looked the way I wanted it to look like and since I am a very picky person and my worst critic – all or nothing sort of. I still envy those who have the talent to draw badass concept art for computer games or fantasy stuff in general.
Well, now I stick mostly to drawing line art by hand, which I turn into a vector image for later use in Photoshop. Sometimes when I feel daring or horribly bored, I draw plants – for some reason I am good at that… well landscapes and plants.
My lack of talent for drawing “bad-ass” looking characters the way I imagine them – including clothes and architecture – I came to 3D around End of 2006. My first program I used was the dolly-house called Poser 7…
But soon, this didn’t satisfy me anymore. The Poser GUI is horrible and clunky. I couldn’t manipulate meshes the way I wanted to. The ready made content never looked the way I wanted it to look like. I tried DazStudio, but hit here the same limits.
So I moved on to Carrara and stuck with this great piece of Software without having to sacrifice all my Poser content.
I only use Poser to inject 3rd Party morphs or make use of dynamic cloth – which I turn into props afterwards. For example when I am using Swidhelm’s Dragons in my scenes. (One day, I hope Carrara has dynamic cloth, too)
That’s what I am today…
Neither fish nor meat – yet I would consider myself a Hobby Digital Artist instead of a 3D Artist.
So yes, I am one of those lame people who use ready made content ;-P
Given, that a lot higher quality 3D content, gets created by whole teams over a couple of months... I think, I rather spend my itty bitty limited free-time creating the scenes/images I have on my mind ;-)
Though, I create most of the textures and shader I use in my scenes from scratch. Very often my line art and some digitally created fancy stuff I did in Photoshop ends up there, too.
Another pretty fact about Carrara and Zbrush – it allows me to manipulate and change meshes of ready-made content, and also their shading domains. A feature I came to love due the lack of really “epic” fantasy style looking male M4 armor and clothes.
Now I can create something “different” from various armor/clothing models and get somewhat closer to what I would love to have. I call that "frankensteining" :-D
A favorite pet-peeve of mine. I wish there were more decent/epic looking fantasy clothes and armor for M4 with actually decent movement morphs. Armor that actually looks like the stuff you can find in Games like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls Skyrim just as an example.
