I grew up around stage and film, wanting to create monsters and was influenced heavily by Ray Harryhausen, Tom Savini, Stan Winston and my first teacher… Dick Smith. Dick took me on as a student of his at the start of my career working as a professional makeup and effects artist at 20.

I slowly moved my traditional skills to digital, working across film and game industry as an art director. I bounced between industries until 1999. I left makeup in 2000, after having to spend six months of my life on an arduous location shoot where I was away from my wife and two little ones. Digital was much better for future-proofing my career.

For almost 20 years I’ve used Maya, Zbrush and a number of different tools for production design and prototyping. In 2006 I started an initiative to take visual effects teams, transforming and teaching them to evolve their skill sets to work in game engines, rather then in expensive render farms… that only reached maturity in the past 8 years. It did, however, give those artists a path forward into the next step for their careers.

I now live in Southern California with wife and three children. Though I work as a Technologist and Director, I still always have my hands on traditional and digital tools. I use Blender and Maya together, along with tools that didn’t have a strong user base till recently. Unreal is a part of my life and working with several of Epic’s teams, them supporting projects, is incredibly fun!

Nomad Sculpt is incredible! It is so intuitive and only just discovering it and being able to simply get to work is a breath of fresh air. My mind is already looking for ways to expose my teams and friends across the industry to what NS will bring to their pipelines for creation.

I’m happy to share my beginnings and gain insight and suggestions from other users…