Carrara PA for Challenge #39 - TangoALpha Bio

Stezza

TangoAlpha (a British digital artist) is our Carrara PA for this Challenge #39.
Click here for his Coming Soon Thread

@TangoAlpha talks about his computer background and how he found Carrara:

"My first experience of computers was an ICL 2960 mainframe at our university’s computing lab. I never actually saw the computer itself.  User interaction was limited to typing on a dumb terminal in a side room, submitting the job, and then returning the next day to pick up a printout of what - hopefully - would be stunning results, although quite often it was just a single page saying “error”.

Then in 1980, a revolution!  The Engineering department got a roomful of Commodore PET 4032 machines. We could finally do real programming and get instantaneous results! What’s more, we could store programs on the 360-kilobyte floppy drives.  In those days you could buy discs singly for about £3 each! (Roughly $9 US)

When the Commodore 64 was released in 1982, I was at the front of the queue!  It was during this time I was introduced to my first computing passion: flight sim.  The original Sublogic flight simulator was little more than stick graphics with monotone green or blue.  But eventually I managed to take off from JFK and find Manhattan (my knowledge of geography at the time was somewhat rudimentary).

The C64 gave way to a C128, then an Amiga and eventually a PC.  I was working for a software company by day, developing commercial database and spreadsheet programs, and by night I was writing for computing magazines, and writing books on computing.

Then in 2007 I discovered Gmax, a 3D application from Autodesk.  I already mentioned Sublogic Flight Simulator, which eventually became Microsoft Flight Simulator, and ultimately Lockheed Martin Prepar3D.  Well, in the intervening years I had decided that the best way to master flight sim was to do it properly, and so I had taken lessons and got a private pilots licence. I was at the airfield, sitting under the wing of the plane, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze (as you do), talking about Gmax, when my mate said, "you should make this airfield for flight sim."  So that was really my first proper foray into the world of 3d: making airports in Gmax for Flight Simulator.

(now ancient Gmax based airport scenery)

By 2012, my writing had switched from technical books and articles to novels. This was the golden age of the Kindle, and self-publishing was the big thing. But where did you go for covers? I remembered my experience with Gmax, and cast my eye around.  There was Poser (expensive) and Daz Studio (free).  Both seemed to make good efforts in rendering, but were pretty useless when it came to building your scene from scratch. That’s when I found Carrara.  It had everything.

So I started trying to visualise scenes from my novels, and render them. Boy was that an uphill struggle!  Anyhow, I entered an image into Challenge #12, and it finished in second place.

A lot more work later, that scene became my first product, Hemlock Folly (you can still find essentially that same camera angle in there!)

The next month I tried something different with an exterior. There were lots of half-baked bits and bobs, and things that really didn’t work, but I learned a lot from the experience, and put it to good practical use further down the road.

Finding myself out of work, and of an age where getting a decent job was increasingly difficult, I decided to go self employed, and work full time on 3D, as well as a number of flight simulator projects, and anything else that comes along. Despite having a hard drive full of half-completed and abandoned sets, I have 17 large environment products in my Daz store — soon to be 18 (and just today I completed the modelling phase on set 19 . . .) So far, everything I’ve done has either been made in Carrara, or comes with a native Carrara version.  Even though I mostly use Modo now for modelling, there are still some things that Carrara does best!"

(Render from ‘Modular sci-Fi Quarterdeck, out next week)

Thanks @TangoAlpha for sponsoring the Carrara #39 Challenge 

Diomede

Rock on, TangoAlpha.  What a great promo for your next set.

Thanks for sponsoring this challenge.

Bunyip02

Diomede said:

Rock on, TangoAlpha.  What a great promo for your next set.

Thanks for sponsoring this challenge.

+1

UnifiedBrain

Excellent and interesting bio TA, thanks for sharing those details.  Great job posting, Stezza!

TangoAlpha

That last pic doesn't show up for me, so I'll attach it again here 

 

DesertDude

Thanks for posting this Stezza - it's always cool to read some background info about Carrara community members. Thanks for hosting the challenge TangoAlpha!

Persona Non Grata

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TangoAlpha

I was playing around with the reverse angle - lighting the set from outside with one of KindredArts' space HDRIs, and rather liked the way it lit up the back wall. I had to crank up the intensity somewhat though. I rather liked the idea of having a bot looking out of the window instead of a person (Stonemason's Recon Drone, and 3Anson/Forbidden Whispers Devastator Drone), and extended that to having the bots watching the guitarist. A single spotlight, parented to the bot was used to highlight the bass player. The light cone was added in post.

 

The reverse angle render: