Alright, so let's see - who is Michelle? My full name is Michelle Natascha and I am quite a usual 28-year old Chihuahua mommy from Germany. I suppose that this sounds as if I really like dogs - and yes, that is true. Little Tico is even climbing over my keyboard and myself as I am writing this.
I've been drawing, painting and trying out all sorts of creative things for as long as I can remember, but my true love in all of this is writing. Being a P&P role-player has made me write quite a lot - starting from my own fantasy worlds to short stories and whole books. And it is really funny, that all of this has introduced me into the 3D World in the end.
It was back in 2003, when I first got in contact with Poser and I remember throwing it away into the next far away corner in frustration, where it had to take a long rest before I bothered to touch it again.
But then copyrights became a serious issue and I - becoming aware of the problem - had to find a way to supply the users of my own forums with avatars. So what was the best way for it? Yes, digging out my long lost Poser and installing it again.
It was a pain to get used to the whole thing and I remember very strange, skinless but bluish colored figures with ugly handpainted hair. I think you would call them faeries or sea creatures.
I am still keeping one of them somewhere to show frustrated beginners that they are far better than me when I was just starting - but ok, someday I had to realize, that you just need to put some skin textures on the figures to make them look better - oh, and suddenly a whole new world was there, waiting to be explored. No more smearing stinky oil paint on a canvas (don't get me wrong, I love it. I just don't get along well with the turpentine but that's another story) and nice new ways to illustrate web sites (another passion of mine).
I can't remember why I started to try out texturing. It was a just for fun thing and I did the first texture for the Mediterranean Dress, I think. It didn't look too good - an ugly, bluish-grey colored thing, but I kept on learning more about it and soon I came up with my first texture set for the MFD and the following ones before I switched to photorealistic characters.
It was a really fascinating experience to build a skin from photographs and it became even better, when I finally got my copy of Zbrush last year. I loved doing custom morphs and I always wanted to try out 3D modelling.
But Zbrush had eaten up a lot of my money for those things and I didn't think that I would ever be able to model anything at all, remembering that my Mom had to help me with the silly perfume bottle we had to sculpt at school in my arts class. So it was not really a good idea to put a lot of money into it.
But then Hexagon 2 came into my life - and I can't tell you if I love or hate it. It must be the first thing, as I can't bring myself to abandon it for another modelling application. Let's just call it a love-hate relationship.
And it finally made me try out something I always wanted to do, ever since the first days of trying to find free hairmodels in the web - yes, hair modelling. Don't ask me why - I just like hair. Painting it, modelling it - all of it.
And after all, after quitting my studies of art history, I am earning my money as a content creator for Poser - and even though it's not always easy, I really enjoy what I am doing and I wouldn't want to change this for any other job.
So this is where I am. And you see, I'm always talking too much, so I'll just leave it at that before you're getting really bored and throw some tomatoes at me.
And if you're from Germany, you could be interested in visiting me and some friends at:
visual.dreamshards.de
Most excellent...thank you very much