Congratulations to TerryGH. Renderosity's Artist of the Month
for February. Take a moment to view TerryGH's Art Gallery at
the following link:
TerryGH
1) Who is TerryGH? TerryGH is some odd fellow who gets up at
5:00 a.m., or stays up late at night to fuss around with computer
graphics for a couple of hours when his more sensible and
hardworking real-life counterpart, Terry G. Halladay, should be
sleeping or occupied with take-home work from his day job as a
department manager at major rare book and manuscript firm. Since
I've simply been too indecisive to come up with a more creative
online nickname, 'TerryGH' has stuck by default. I'm just barely on
the far side of fifty years old, and live with my extraordinarily
patient and supportive wife, Laura, in Hamden, a town just to the
north of New Haven, Connecticut. I'm a computer graphics amateur in
the literal sense of the word, finding in that pursuit my own form
of building ships in a bottle - a diversion wholly divorced from
the tasks, concerns and interests that occupy my daytime hours.
Though I am considerably hampered by a complete lack of skills as
an original artist -- in the sense of someone who can pick up the
tools of an artistic medium and, from scratch, establish a working
connection between an original thought and those tools that results
in a translation of that thought to paper, pixel or canvas - some
years working with photography and many more years looking
jealously, enviously, and appreciatively at the works of real
artists have made me at least conscious of the rudiments of light
and composition, in a way sufficient to make me want to give it a
try in my own small way.
2) How long have you have you been
rendering? It was late in 1996 that I came across Peter
Plantec's really quite excellent book, The trueSpace 2 Bible, while
browsing in a book store, and though up to that point I'd never
really thought to try my hand at anything serious in the way of 3d
design, the book intrigued me, and that led to my first encounter
with trueSpace. I think version 2 was then in its final days, and I
followed the upgrade path shortly thereafter from 2/SE to 3. Still,
it wasn't until a year or two later that I moved from the
inevitable phase of occasional "chrome balls on a checkerboard"
renders and quick Saturday afternoon throwaways to the first of my
images that engaged me for a while in its construction and revision
- that was in the Fall of 1998, with the image "Closing Time."
3) What are you currently working on? I've probably got as
large a collection of half-started works-in-progress as anyone I
know, perhaps more. Among them are several more images in my series
in homage to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a subject I love and think
offers a vast number of possibilities for both directly derivative
works, as well as thematically inspired works. It is, after all, a
very small leap in the mind -- though an enormous technical leap --
from Metropolis to Blade-Runner. There's also a project involving
carnival life that's been nagging at my mind for at least six
months now, and I've got at least three images I've poked at on
occasion that have their roots in some of the work of the Vorticist
artists and their depictions of the Great War. At any given moment,
I may pick up one of these projects and create a bit of additional
mesh for it, or adapt a texture, or, as they say, "do deep
background research" J
4) What software do you use and why?
The great majority of my work has been with trueSpace, most
particularly with trueSpace 4.3. That's the modeling and rendering
application I feel most at home with, and it remains an immensely
accessible, versatile program that I'd recommend without any
reservation to someone wanting to learn the 3d ropes. But I've not
had the time to make much of a transition to version five, although
it's been out over a year now. Since any moment I spend on graphics
is a moment stolen from other activities or necessities, I can't
help but return most often to that application in which I feel most
productive for those few moments. Late last year, after spending
some time with a demo, I bought Maxon's C4DXL7, and am gradually
learning my way around in it. I was particularly attracted to it
because of its very effective use of my dual-processor system, and
because of the implementation in this version of several
significant elements of Cebas Software's rendering technology. I'm
a very big fan of Cebas, having worked with their Pyrocluster
plug-in for trueSpace as a beta-tester. It'll likely be awhile
before I am up to speed with C4D, but I've had a great time
rendering out a long series of doodles as I get acquainted with its
features. I'm finding that I get along with its internal logic and
workflow quite happily. I won a copy of DeepPaint 3d in the 2001
Pixxelpoint.org competition, and have at the same time been working
toward getting a feel for its potential. I regularly turn to Corel
Painter for texture, cloning and compositing work. I think it's an
amazing program, and though, as I said above, I have no capacity
whatsoever for original 2d art, it's a great program to simply sit
down and spend a few minutes with, doing throw-away doodles that no
one other than I have to look at. Though I seldom do much in the
way of post-processing of 3d renders, I have Corel Photopaint here
at home and Photoshop at my office when the need arises. As far as
other apps.well, I use Poser 4 for generating human meshes for
importation into my main 3d apps, but I can hardly begin to say
that I' ve explored its potential as an animation package, or put
it to any real tests with work such as we're lucky to view here
everyday on Renderosity. I' ve still got Bryce 4, though I've never
felt at home with its interface, and consequently gave up on trying
much more than an occasional doodle with it back with version
three. But that about covers the applications I use to any
measurable extent. I've worked with either demos of a number of
other 3d packages, or spent time with them on the workstations of
other local license holders, and stand in awe of some of their
features, but given that I'm likely to always remain a simple
amateur, it's unlikely that I could justify the expense of
equipping myself with one of my dream applications and the adjuncts
to go with it.
5) Why do you like 3D art? Computer generated
3d art, as a medium, has gotten its hooks into me for several
reasons. For one, it affords an appealing mixture of the technical
and the aesthetic. More years ago than I care to reckon, I was
involved in purely technical pursuits, as a science and mathematics
major in school, and then, for a short period, as an engineering
major at university. While the path that got me from there to the
rare book business is far too circuitous and boringly personal to
merit retracing here - other than to say that, like many others, I
was a child of the '60s - I've never lost my appreciation for, and
interest in, the technical and scientific dimensions of our
universe. Though the analogy breaks down on the physiological
level, it's kind of a left hemisphere - right hemisphere connect
for me, the two disparate worlds I've been involved in for half a
century meeting on the screen of a monitor, at the touch of a
mouse, in the tools and in the literature of computer graphics, and
in the broad horizons of possibility that reach out ahead of us in
the worlds of CG to come in the future. On a more immediate level,
3d art makes available to the artist an extraordinary range of
variables and tools with which to create something. Speaking for
myself, I'm drawn to the visualization of effects in large volumes
of space - the effects of light, of atmospherics, of edifices in
relation to each other and the spaces between and around them. 3d
art gives me the opportunity to construct those voluminous spaces
(whether they be on the macro or the micro level) and to create
those effects, via special algorithms written by wonderful and
talented techno-wizards, and to mold them, and revise them and to
upset them in ways not possible (or easily possible) in other
media, and without tremendous waste of materials and time. And
there's a good deal of satisfaction to be derived from just gaining
more understanding of the process of creation behind 3d imagery in
film and other media. I've been an unabashed movie junkie since I
was tall enough to reach the ticket window, and the extra insight
that working with CGI allows, even on the limited level I am
working with it, enhances my understanding of what went into the
creation of the field of s/fx films I've admired, from the era of
the silents all the way up to The Matrix and Final Fantasy. I still
remember with no small measure of awe when a friend of mine in the
Wolfpack sent me one of his remarkable meshes to work with for the
first time. I sat there, in front of my monitor, working with a
mesh no less than the carefully crafted equivalent of the model
used for filming Babylon 5. It felt like I'd stepped through a door
into a new level of appreciation and understanding of the process.
6) What inspires you? With just a handful of exceptions, I
think the sources of inspiration for the public graphics works I've
done are referenced fairly clearly in the images themselves: the
Metropolis images, the Piranesi images, the homage to Things to
Come etc. More often than not, I embark on a project after seeing
somewhere a photograph or other source work that strikes me
strongly at a particular moment, and I set out to consciously
recreate something inspired by that source work - whether it be
something clearly derivative in subject matter, or something less
clearly defined.a tone, an emotion, an effect of light or space.
For example, Street, which I suppose has gotten to be more or less
my best known image, started off after I'd spent an afternoon
looking at some photographs of 19th century New York street scenes.
In the end, Street doesn't follow any of them in any particular
fashion, and is of another time period entirely, but it was the
cumulative effect of viewing all those photographs that got me to
sit down and get to work. Imaginary Industry #5 is another case in
point. It's one of several images I 've made utilizing this overall
external building structure.the sequence of interconnected
"lobbies," so to speak, in a much larger building. At various
times, I've filled lobbies with different gizmos or substructures,
just as idle exercises. But the overall building was vaguely
inspired by some photographs of the ruins of an abandoned asylum I
happened across. Once I point that out, the source becomes evident
in the image, though the final subject matter of this particular
use of the setting is far removed from it. There are actually a
couple of rather spooky images I made using the structure that are
quite obviously tied closer to the asylum theme, but they're still
filed away as works in progress or "private" works. My own tastes
in art are fairly catholic, but I do have favorite genres, and they
tend to inspire/influence the images I've completed, and the far
greater number that I've tried to make, but never brought to
completion. Street speaks to my love of the photographers and
artists of the 1930s associated, in either a specific or thematic
sense, with the WPA and the move toward social realism, often of a
political bent. On the other hand, I also have a preference for a
lot of art associated with the advent of 20th century Modernism -
much of it non-representational -- particularly as it is so often
tied to equivalent developments in literature. Dada, Vorticism,
Constructivism.all that sort of work. And of course, there are a
number of CG artists whose work I follow, among whom I'll mention
only one for the sake of brevity: Dave McKean, though he's hardly
working only in CG. I'm constantly amazed at his capacity to
combine several media in one work. I've gone on too long here, so
will conclude with my sincere thanks to both the administrators and
the artists of Renderosity for the unexpected honor of my selection
as AOM for February 2002. The making of computer imagery, like any
art form, is a solitary pursuit during most of the act of creation.
But that act is in many ways incomplete unless the final work, or
the work in progress, is subjected to the scrutiny of objective
viewers for critique and evaluation. Without that scrutiny, the
maker can never know for sure if the work he or she has undertaken
has accomplished its aesthetic end, or conveyed its message, or
communicated its narrative. Some of us are very fortunate in having
a circle of trusted friends to whom we can show our work for advice
and/or criticism as it progresses; for me, my friends in the
trueSpace community and in the Wolfpack have been instrumental in
helping me reach whatever level of accomplishment I can claim. But
Renderosity makes available an unequalled forum for the exposure of
artists' works for all to see, to comment on and discuss, to learn
from, and by which to be inspired and challenged. It's something
akin to that circle of friends, multiplied by thousands.
Terry
Halladay thallad@pcnet.com www.pcnet.com/~thallad
