A cadd operator who had worked for us off and on at my Engineering Business for several years finally graduated from University of Miami in 1996 and stopped by to show me his portfolio and gave me several cd's of "goodies". Through his generous newfound resource, I went to work learning how to use a multitude of graphics programs. I already had interest since I was making maps for Doom II at the time. When Threewave CTF came out for Quake 1, I was hooked in the game big time and played in tournaments for several years and was making skins for players and graphics for clan web sites. In 1998, I started learning to make maps for Quake 1. No sooner than I had started learning that, Q3A came out and I soon began making skins for Q3A players and worked on CTF mod projects. When Half Life came out, that's when I really began to dissect everything and learned Milkshape3D well enough to build weapons with animation and skin them too, including players. Even though I had Unreal Tournament, I was deep into Half Life work and occasional Q1 & Q3A mapping until UT2003 came out.
When UT2003 came out, I dropped all other game formats and jumped into the UT2003 editor with all fours. I never forgot the first time I opened CTF-Magma; blew me away. This is what I was looking to do/create. It was months later until I understood WHY CTF-Magma was made in a 3D prog; Frame Rate issues. It was then evident to me that I needed to learn 3DS max or Maya to do something of this magnitude. I choose 3DS max, nabbed all the Busby VTM's I could, and started learning a new 3D prog.
Since November 2004, I have been working with a collaborative group of mappers in the Ultimate Community Map Pack or UCMP for short. The knowledge shared has proven helpful and new friendships have also developed as well. I have been helping people with textures, pathing, emitters, mesh work, optimization, etc. and I can say honestly that it's been a good experience for me.
Working with Liquid Development since November 2005 has been great. Not only do I get to work with one of the upcoming best game engines ever made, but I also get to collaborate and work with an incredible staff of talent too! I am insipred daily from the entire team from their posts - man! I love my job!
