Just as I was starting my first college teaching job, I bought a Macintosh Centris and some illustration software. A brochure came in the mail advertising a software package called Strata Studio Pro, and I saw pictures from Marco Patrito’s digital graphic novel, Sinkha, and from Robin and Rand Miller’s computer game Myst, which has both been produced using Studio Pro.
Sinkha was a computer-generated graphic novel. Marco Patrito, an artist from Italy (Turin, I believe) had started out to create a printed book, but ended up releasing it on a CD as a multimedia graphic novel with short animations. It was a book, but you experienced it like a video game. This is an advertisement for it. The girl and the starship grabbed my attention immediately.
This is a short clip from YouTube that introduces Sinkha and the artist. It’s a little slow-moving, but you’ll see the quality of Patrito’s art and get a sense of the challenges he worked through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZEsn2dO5wU&index=2&list=PLdCZb8PAVZJbT7HQnAAfodSxgpqFZh1I0
MYST was one of the most popular computer-based video games of its time. It took the visitors through a series of puzzles. It was beautifully rendered but very slow moving by today’s standards. Computers were much less powerful, and objects like trees were memory hogs and the artists faced the challenge of creating the best-looking image possible with the lowest polygon count. I still like looking at it. Some of the best art is done when artists have to work around the limitations of their media.
Once I’d seen what StudioPro could do, I had to have it. It cost about $1500, but I managed to get it for about $300 with an educational discount, and that’s how I entered the world of 3D computer art. I learned about the textures that wrap around objects to give them color, shininess, the illusion of bumpiness, and spots of transparency. I learned about “rendering,” which is when you take a simple looking model or a “wireframe” and get the computer to add all of the reflections and shadows to make a more realistic looking final picture. I also learned about all of the ways to create a shape. In a later version of StudioPro, I learned about adding bones and joints to a 3D character. In the industry, that’s calling “rigging.”
I spent about four years trying to teach myself to sculpt a human head in 3D. Basically, you took a sphere, subdivided it, and pulled the vertices around with a mouse until you got a head shape. I struggled for years, but I’d seen Marco Patrito’s art, so I knew it was possible to create human characters with Studio Pro.
I didn’t find out until a couple of years ago that he had Photoshopped his StudioPro models to cover the imperfections. I’m not criticizing him. He was working with the limitations of the software. I just wish I had known that. I never did get my human figures to look too great, but I did create this astronaut walking through a lunar version of Arlington Cemetery. I bronzed my human figures and turned them into statues. I also used a landscape generating program called Bryce to do some of the work on the landscape.
After struggling with human figures for a while, I tried mixing my 3D art (the man in the spacesuit, in this case) with figures I’d drawn in a paint program. The results really didn’t look too bad, and I’m sure I could have refined them to create a better effect if I’d spent more time working on them.
This printout didn’t have the frames or narration and the page layout could have used some work, but you get the idea. In case you’re wondering, this man is having a recurring nightmare about visiting the graves of fallen comrades and seeing a specter of a female cyborg. She’s standing there behind him without a spacesuit and glaring at him. “You did this to me.” Those of you who read Intrepid Force might recognize that the man in the spacesuit as Gene Sheppard. The female cyborg represents his guilt about the accident that led to Wendy Blake becoming a cyborg. She’s a pretty, human-looking cyborg in the book, but it took a lot of surgery to get her that way.
While I was working on this, a software package called Poser came out that offered ready-made 3D people, but I’m getting ahead of myself. One of the last things I did with StudioPro was the console on the cover of the first Intrepid Force book (and the space station on the back). I still like the way the metal and the red dome in the middle rendered. By then, I was also using Poser figures and instrumentation I’d build using a program called Lightwave. But that’s a story for another time.
