I remember my first day at Kesmai.
I was told in no uncertain terms that I would be required to be there by 10am,
..we had an hour for lunch ..
..and we had to stay at least till 2pm because there may be a meeting to attend.
I was ..well ..stunned a bit, comin from careers that began their workday before the sun came up
and ended long after sunset ..with weekends off rare to non-existant.
Then there was the 'work' itself.
I had to come up with a way to make every shape in Air Warrior better.
(no texture maps in online gaming, anywhere, then)
Build accurate models of WW2 planes/ships and a bit more terrain features of the era.
I also had to make hi-res texture mapped models to use in screen shots.
I was also tasked with making magazine covers, box covers, ads, ..all the way down to icons.
Hurt me.
I used a lot of what I had learned in CAD engineering directly.
I got so sucked in I useda stay till midnite or later and come back in before dawn.
They gave me the key to the place since I was last out, first in most days.
The Mustang looked so good ..and the B-17 even had the turrets it was supposed to have..
..instead of the boxes with wings they were.
And every single one of my shapes had fewer polygons than the boxes they replaced.
Tony Feldmesser and Mr. Tanaka had built the originals but ..CAD engineering taught me a whole lot
that they just did not know about how to make efficient use of a polygon.
I jammed.. and taught others when I could.
Rich Sisson became a decent model builder, then Greg Grimsby..
..even Jay Thompson (aka Vossman) learned how to wrestle a decent shape
from DOS 3dStudio for the many screen shots we needed.
(although he always used far too many polygons!)
Then came texure mapping in a realtime 3d environment
.. that's a whole nuther story with Tony Wetmore, Jonathan 'Blue' Baron and I just jamming.
We blew everyone's mind, it was magic in action.
-Frank aka GE
Lead Artist for Air Warrior 1995-End
