A good while back, one of my hobbies was creating 3D models on the computer. I cut my teeth on Ray Dream Studio back in 1995 when it was still a Metacreations product. I had some vague notion of someday doing it professionally, but never took it very seriously, because I didn't even know where to start in finding professional education and personnel contacts for getting a job in that particular industry. I was also a bit of a programmer, and I was always writing quick-and-dirty little utilities in Visual Basic to simplify computer tasks, as well as doing game-related stuff like dice rollers and roleplaying assistants for AOL chat rooms. These two hobbies of mine led me to discover a really neat third hobby: homebrew video game programming and development using tools like DarkBasic Classic, 3D RAD, and so forth. I had to learn how to model and texture low-polycount realtime 3D models, and I had to get acquainted with how DirectX and OpenGL worked. Then one day, I got back into playing tabletop games like Warhammer 40,000, which added yet another hobby to the list.

Part of the fun I had with the tabletop gaming hobby was in scratchbuilding and converting things, and one of my favorite materials for that job happened to be paper. I'd lay out basic geometric shapes with a protractor, pen, compass, and ruler, and cut them out with my trusty X-Acto knife. These ersatz gaming constructs were hand painted and had actual surface relief and details. They were pretty tedious to build, even though they looked pretty neat. The day I discovered Tenkai (the precedessor to Pepakura Designer), it brought all of those hobbies crashing together into something new: creating low-polycount textured models and automatically unfolding them into printable developments that could be cut out and glued together into a physical object that looked very much like the original 3D model.

Shortly after getting a feel for Tenkai, I proceeded to design my first low-polycount 3D model specifically for unfolding into a paper model. I had this mental image of some sort of futuristic aircraft in Flying Tigers livery, and I named it the Fei Qiu, which was Chinese for "flying little horned dragon". I created the 3D model in 3D Canvas Pro, unfolded it with Tenkai, and then textured the unfolded development in Paint Shop Pro 7. Tenkai's feature set was pretty limited, and it didn't have very many of the advanced features that Pepakura Designer has these days, so it was something of a chore. I had to learn a lot about how printers worked, what PostScript was, and get intimate with details like print resolution and driver settings.

Eventually, I got the process figured out, and I printed out the finished model on a really chintzy $50 Apollo printer. At the highest quality settings, the printouts were horribly coarse and grainy, but I was still excited because I'd tried something new and succeeded after a fashion. Then the fun part came: actually putting the thing together. The model had about 40 parts, and was basically a single hollow volume. I managed to get it together, and actually built around seven or eight prototypes. After all was said and done, I came to the conclusion that the technology just wasn't quite there yet, and that it was actually easier to just scratchbuild the models and paint them by hand. 

Oh, and my computer totally died a couple months afterwards, taking all of the source files with it. I was pretty discouraged, and moved on to other things for a while.

I dabbled in sculpting my own miniatures for a while, using all kinds of materials ranging from Sculpey to Kneadatite. It turned out that I had a basic talent for it and that with practice, I could eventually do my own figures and sell them. I spent several months practicing, researching, and preparing myself for dealing with the business issues. I learned more than anyone would want to know about all of the factors involved, and I came to the conclusion that doing it just wasn't cost-effective in the end, and that it'd be less work and more profitable to just wear a funny hat and ask people if they'd like some fries with their burger.

But I knew I still wanted to do something related to miniatures gaming in a professional capacity, and it was always somewhere in the back of my mind.

Fast forward to 2003. Four things happened: I found a simple and easy way to create PDF files in OpenOffice.org 1, the first version of Pepakura Designer came out, and I found companies like Microtactix and Worldworks selling their wares on RPGNow. RPGNow was an amazingly novel place in these days, a site where you could buy all kinds of things in PDF format, not just cardstock models. With nearly all of the old hurdles gone, I decided to try my hand at creating at least one commercial cardstock model. I decided on a robot, and I wanted it to come in several color scheme options. After a few months of getting re-acquainted with all the software that I hadn't used in a while, I ended up with a model that I liked, and I called it the MQ-3A Murphy. I learned just as much from this model as I did from the Fei Qiu, and it went through several revisions as I stumbled through the process of getting it right. I built several prototypes and wrestled with several issues related to layout, presentation, and had to learn how to photograph models. I eventually figured it out, thankfully.

I finally sent in the vendor application to RPGNow somewhere near the end of August 2003, and uploaded the Murphy on September 9, 2003. It sold much better than I had anticipated, and I started getting e-mails from a lot of really nice people who had bought the model. I learned a lot from their feedback, and I updated the model into an even simpler and easier-to-build development. Something also clicked mentally, and I was able to do newer models in a faster and more efficient fashion with each release.

Pretty soon, I had found my niche in designing cardstock robots and mecha. I designed the first fully 3D infantry model on the market, the PzKpfR-62 Wiking battlesuit. This model was the smallest mecha I'd designed at the time, standing 36mm tall, and it was the best-selling of the 2003-2004 models. The Wiking inspired our mascot Ernst, the little chibi-style gray Wiking at the leftmost side of the site's masthead image. 

I'm still the only designer in the industry who does fully 3D infantry models in this size, from the Wiking to the XM709 Hercules and the upcoming XM644 Achilles.

For the sake of variety, I also decided to try my hand at scenery. I designed the first full-color, fully 3D science-fiction scenery set on the market, Derelict Classic, in 2003. It was 24 pages, and was designed way before the industry had settled on a standard set of conventions, and it lacked props. I learned quite a bit in the process, since scenery has a whole different set of design considerations than regular models. It sold really well, even better than the models I'd done earlier.

Shortly afterwards, I decided to try and develop my own shop rather than selling solely through RPGNow. I learned enough Perl in a week to create a working secure download delivery system, figured out how to integrate it with 2Checkout, and revamped the Ebbles Miniatures website from its old white-on-gray theme to the white and golden yellow scheme that exists to this day. To my surprise, I actually sold more through my own shop monthly than I did through RPGNow, which was something of an eye-opener.

My second scenery set was a set of exterior fortifications, bunkers, walls, and towers named Firebase Maginot, released near early 2004. Again, it was a learning experience, and despite its basic nature, it still sold well into recent years. After designing Firebase Maginot, I started on Derelict II, intending to apply everything I'd learned from both of the previous scenery sets. I designed a comprehensive props pack (The Ambient Elements Collection II), and tested new ways of packaging the sets. Derelict II was the first scenery set to be sold as a core set containing just the essentials, with optional add-ons for purpose-specific rooms. The Derelict II line was the biggest seller of 2004, and was still selling well into recent years. The rest of the industry started putting out some fantastic science-fiction scenery sets around this time, like Stones Edges's Orbital and WorldWorks Games's Spaceworks: First Light.

After a one-year cost-efficiency analysis, I determined that I was paying RPGNow more in fees and commissions than it cost to operate my own storefront, which offended my sense of order. I stopped selling through RPGNow shortly afterwards, and focused all of my sales efforts on my storefront.

In 2004 and 2005, I decided to apply my programming knowledge to card model design. I had this idea for a model format that would allow people to choose exactly the colors they wanted for their model, in a point-and-click interface. It would use a freeware viewer application for that functionality, and the idea was that people would buy the models in this new format, and they'd get exactly the colors they wanted, rather than settling for a handful of predetermined color schemes. I called this format UCM, for User Customizable Model. The format and viewer application went through months of private testing, and several of the 2003 models were released in UCM format.

UCM was an abject commercial failure, but is still popular to this day for free models, such as the Chickenhawk and UHV 2000 Walrus developed by Marcos "Topo" Hidalgo. After the failure of UCM, I decided to try again with the editable model concept, using the more familiar Adobe Photoshop PSD format. That also failed commercially, and I learned the basic truth, which is that the number of people who like to tweak their models is always going to be far smaller than the number of people who are happy with a predefined selection of schemes. So I went back to PDF, and it was smooth sailing once again.

In 2006, I finally acquired a copy of Photoshop CS. Before that, I'd been happily splashing around in Paint Shop Pro 7, and not understanding what all the fuss about Photoshop was. Boy, was I ever wrong...there's a reason Photoshop costs as much as it does: it's a VERY powerful tool. My introduction started with a copy of Photoshop Elements that I had acquired in 2005 with my Wacom graphics tablet, and I quickly outgrew its capabilities and decided to buy Photoshop CS.

I spent most of that year with my nose buried in a stack of Photoshop books, and generally doing nothing but practicing my texturing skills in a superior working environment. My model output for that year dropped, but my texturing improved quite a bit. I was able to get the same techniques done much more quickly, errors were easier to fix, and it was generally just a much more enjoyable tool for texturing.

I also acquired several other work applications, replacing my old shoestring-budget toolset almost completely. The net effect of a slow 2006 is a huge step up in the quality of my work, my confidence, and much less stress from fighting inadequate tools and inefficient workflow.

Now it's 2007, and I feel like I'm just getting started.