Introduction.
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Purpose
The purpose of this new adventure in blogging, is to basically give me a time-out from my day to day duties at Microsoft. In that, I typically live, eat, breathe and dream about .NET to the point where it sometimes can consume you above and beyond the normal person. That being said, I needed an outlet, something non-Microsoft, something that didn't require me to watch what I say, whom I say it to and then count how many people I'm likely to offend by what I just said.
Enter, 3D modeling. 3D modeling is something I've had a passion for since 1998 when I first saw a friend of mine make a 3D model for TV ad. It's always been there at the back of my creative skills, lurking and demanding I spend the time it requires sooner or later. Given the role I'm at within Microsoft (Rich Platforms Product Manager) has essentially removed me from the day to day coding & design, it has in many ways also provided me with a lot of free time after hours to persue projects that I want or have an interest around.
My idea is to simply go back to school on this one, study at my own pace Autodesk Maya, probably one of the hardest 3D applications in the world, yet from what I can see the most powerful. The goal for me, is to blog my adventures (the good & the bad) but also look at ways of combining my passion 3D, with my work (.NET). I plan on mixing Silverlight/WPF with 3D artwork, which in many ways will combine programming and design together, given my background is also a designer and developer.
This blog will echo my thoughts, hurdles put before me and so on. I hope to prove that one can not only write complex code, design 2D but also produce 3D animation/modeling to match. I like being a hands on design generalist, and consider myself a designer whom knows how to program.
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Training
I've bought a whole heap of Digital-Tutors.com DVD's as well as raided the Microsoft Library (turns out we have pretty much the whole gnomon workshop + digitaltutors.com in our internal library system - go Microsoft!). I've found these to be a must-have when it comes to self-paced & un-mentored learning path. I'll followup with a blog post shortly on some tips to approaching onling training, but overall these are the main focal points of my training.
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Technology
I've bought a copy of Autodesk Maya 2009, given the learning edition watermark was getting on my nerves. It's extremly expensive to buy solo, but in my opinion worth the investment long term. I also own Adobe & Microsoft products aswell, and this blog is actually using Coldfusion under the hood (Mango Blog is nice!). The reason I chose Coldfusion to house this site, is well, prior to joining Microsoft this was my platform of choice when it came to the web. I spent countless hours / years perfecting my skills with Coldfusion and well like I said, living and breathing .NET day in day out, has it's upsides and downsides. Instead, I wanted to use this idea/blog as simply a place to use an alternative technology, to help broaden my horizons and keep an open mind about how others outside the .NET ecosystem live and breathe when it comes to the web.