Around the Holidays of 1999/2000, I caught wind of Full Sail needing lab instructors for their new Computer Animation Program. This was too good to pass up, I knew most of the people working in the program from when I was a student, and it was the first real opportunity of a career in computer animation. I ended up working for Todd Palamar in the Final Project class. This was the final class students would take before graduating from the program. Things were pretty intense for a while; I had A LOT to learn... The tricky part was I had to know everything about Maya, due to the fact that my responsibility was to help the students complete their project. Questions regarding anything and everything would be asked along the way. I helped the students outside of Maya also, painting textures in Photoshop, editing and compositing in After Effects. Even things like file management and project organization cause a lot more trouble than one might think. I had a strong background in modeling, animating, and the 2D side of graphics going in, but I knew very little about most everything else. It took me about 6 months to build my knowledge base of Maya, but it covered just about everything. I learned a lot about modeling, character setup, texturing, animating, lighting, expressions, and dynamics. Todd was an incredible person to work for, and I owe a lot of what I know to him. I also met some of my best friends while working there. If there ever was a question I couldn't answer for a student, I could always refer to one of them.

We would get a new class of students every month. Each class would be in Final Project for 2 months, so we had 2 sets of students to deal with at a time. The students were to complete a 30 second animation for their demo reel, which was also the majority of their grade for the class. This was just the lab portion of the class; there were also plenty of lectures. I would often sit in on Todd's lectures. The real world perspective he gave towards projects really helped me understand computer animation on a whole new level. I eventually was given one of his lecture days to show the students how to use the Unreal Editor, giving them a taste of game production. I researched UnrealEd for a month or 2 and came up with 2 basic tutorials on editing levels. I also wrote a tutorial on creating realistic looking textures in Photoshop from scratch. It explained why alpha channels are so powerful, and how to use them to their fullest.

Full Sail was a great experience, in the year and a half I worked there, I probably learned as much as I did while I was a student. But all things come to an end eventually, and I decided to move on in August of 2001. I took a job doing 3D and 2D for American Systems Corporation. Their office is really close to Full Sail, so it was an easy transition. That was part of my motivation for leaving Full Sail, I wanted to work on some projects, and develop my skills. The first challenge while working at ASC was to teach myself a new software package, 3D Studio Max. I'll admit it, I was a Maya snob! I hated the idea of trying to learn this "inferior" package. I would constantly compare it to Maya, and frustration would often stop my progress. The most difficult part of the process was that I had no one to ask questions of, everyone I knew used Maya. Well, it took me a good month to really get comfortable with Max. I'm still learning things about it, but I would say I'm more than adept with it now. I actually prefer it to Maya in some aspects now.

3D graphics were pretty new to ASC when I started working there. After talking with my boss about ways to approach the images I was to create, it was decided to keep things fairly simple. As time progressed however, the client (the Navy), and our managers started to better understand what goes into creating 3D graphics. We started to implement texturing, better lighting, even some special effects and compositing at times. Hiring 2 more 3D artists also gave us the ability to do nicer quality work. I've rambled on for quite a while now, so let's get to the good stuff! Everything on this page was produced while working for ASC.