Introductions!

I thought I'd start this blog out with a little bit about myself and how I've come to find my career in technical art.  It was a fairly long path for me, but once I found it there was no stopping.  Like a lot of kids coming out of high school I wanted to make games even though I had no idea what making games meant.  I started in Computer Science before I realized that programming wasn't the career for me and eventually got my degree in Fine Arts.

As soon as I started touching 3D art I couldn't pull myself away from it.  The mix of technology and art fit my background perfectly and I started to dive head first into scripting to take control of the program and be able to do more than working with the program alone could offer.  I was fortunate to have instructors that encouraged my use of programming to make art, my first real work in 3ds Max turned into a helicopter auto rigger and flight simulator running in real time in the Max viewport.  When started it tracked mouse input to mimic the movement of a joystick and throttle to bring the helicopter model to life and capture the animation along the way.

Since that beginning I've been focused on learning the foundations of rigging and molding my techniques by working closely with animators and modelers to find solutions that elegantly provided the power they needed with as simple of an interface as possible so that they can focus on the art they love without getting caught up in the technical details of the programs they're in.

I've now worked in the games industry for nearly 3 years and have had the pleasure of cutting my teeth on the behemoth of a game that is Guild Wars 2 before finding my way to Bungie to help ship Destiny and beyond.  My focus has and always will be treating the most technical sides of content creation as an art form itself, from designing tools and pipelines to setting up character deformation.  It all requires an artists eye and a technical mind to develop the ground breaking work that we do in games and I hope to use this blog to share my thoughts and experiences on approaching technical problems from an artistic point of view.


For a little more of a look at how I got into technical art in games you can check out my breaking in interview over at bungie.net.

http://www.bungie.net/7_Breaking-In---Micah-Zahm/en-us/News/News?aid=10323