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Born: January 17th 1976, in Pointe Claire, Quebec, Canada |
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Education: Pure & Applied Science (2 years), Computer Science (1 year), BFA in Design Art (3 years) |
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Job History: Animator at Blur Studio 1999 - 2002, Technical Director at Pixar 2002 - present |
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Neil Likes: Monsters, Scifi and Fantasy Movies, Death Metal, Quake 3, Playing Guitar and Drums, Drawing & Painting, Museums, Swimming and Hiking . |
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Favorite TV: Babylon 5, Dr Katz, Samurai Jack, The Howard Stern Show, The Simpsons, 60 Minutes, SouthPark, Whose Line Is It Anyways? |
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Favorite Movies: Bulworth, The Crow, Drunken Master 2, Fight Club, The Matrix, Ninja Scroll, Robocop, Starship Troopers |
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Favorite Artists: H.R. Giger, Heidi Taillefer, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Luis Royo, Dave McKean, Ashley Wood, Dale Keown, Marc Silvestri, Michael Turner, JMW Turner, Paul Klee |
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Home Computer: Dual Opteron 248 with 2 Gigs of RAM |
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Main Software: 3DStudio MAX, Brazil r/s, Photoshop |
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| Our questions to Neil about Power Solids. |
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How Long have you been working with Power Solids? |
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I've been using power solids for a little over 2 years now. |
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What has been your experience with the Power Solids learning curve and how long did it take you to start incorporating Power Solids into your modeling workflow? |
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The initial learning curve was pretty straight forward since power solids follows the max paradigm quite well, if you know max, you'll figure out power solids quite quickly. There was a bit of a learning curve with respect to what you can and cannot turn into a powersolid, or what types of meshes don't boolean well. Like really complex mesh objects are less likely to make a good power solid. But I learned pretty quickly how to rebuild many complex shapes entirely with Power solids itself, and now rarely have problems. Also, over the past 2 years, you guys have done a great job improving the software, so now the chance of having an invalid object is very rare. |
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What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of the Power Solids integration with 3ds Max. |
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They're really well integrated. |
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What are some of the reasons that you make Power Solids a part of your modeling arsenal? |
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Well, booleans that work is a big one. Back when I was using povray 15 years ago, I could do booleans left and right. Then when I came to 3dstudio dos (and later max), there was no csg, only mesh objects, so booleans were more hit and miss (performing a boolean on a mesh object is mathematically way harder than with csg). It's wonderful to be able to use them again without constantly worrying whether they'll work or not. Also, I love fillets. Rounded corners add realism to a mesh, and doing the same thing with subdivs takes a lot of extra work setting up extra edges and such. With power solids, you can automatically fillet all the edges of your mesh with one checkbox, or choose an edge and give it a radius, which I just love. |
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Is there any one tool or function of Power Solids you particularly like? |
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I primarily use the extrude / boolean / join tools, and of course the fillet options all over the place. |
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Could you please tell us how you feel about our technical and customer support? |
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They've been very helpful, I've probably passed on a few dozen bugs over the years, and each one of them got looked at and resolved within days or weeks. Talk about fast turnaround. |
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The images below are some of my personal favorites of Neils non nPower work. |
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