ART STORIES: From Farm To Philly

How One 3D Artist Got Un-Stuck & Took On The World

By: Daniel Rose

This was originally posted in the GameTextures Website Blog. You can find that blog here.

Have you experienced a moment in life when the realization that a dream from long ago has been accomplished?

It’s a bizarre feeling when it hits you. It never follows the narrative we are exposed to in movies, and it rarely is in line with your expectations. There’s no build up, no panic, and no anxiety. The feeling, the knowledge of this dream being accomplished, most often comes during silent moments of self-reflection as you experience a split second realization that something you’ve wanted your entire life had come to be, even if long forgotten. It is a moment when a long-term plan, divided in to chewable chunks of action and jostled by life has actually culminated in fulfilling a dream.

My moment came last year. I was walking back to my AirBnB in Grammercy Park from Vayner Media’s Midtown Manhattan office on Park Avenue. It was another hot New York day. I was consumed by my thoughts. I remember the sounds of the living, breathing city around me, the crunch of the debris and muck on the sidewalk beneath my feet, and the smell of the summer air. New York smells strange in the summer, as if the best pizzeria was next to the dirtiest trash bin.

That’s when it hit me.

As a kid who grew up primarily in the cornfields of Indiana, New York seemed like a far off place in a completely different world. The towering skyscrapers existed only on TV, and the sprawling city was only a concept.

I was 18 when I saw New York City for the first time. I was on a chartered bus for my High School Senior Trip in early 2005. We came up through I-95 after spending almost 5 days in Washington DC. I liked DC well enough as it is full of history and is the heart of our federal government, but I was more excited to see New York and give actual context to the images and movies which informed my knowledge at the time.

The moment I saw the skyline for the first time remains imprinted into my memories. I was listening to Metallica’s No Leaf Clover. The lyrics filled my head, the approaching city emphasized by the fullness of the music:

“And it feels right this time
On this crash course with the big time
Pay no mind to the distant thunder
New day fills his head with wonder, boy”

All I could think about on that trip was that I was going to be in a big city someday.

Central Park

As I walked back to the AirBnB to get ready for the gym, I paused on that feeling and smiled. A long forgotten dream has been realized and in more ways and places than I thought.

I’ve always had a fascination with games. I was a young kid of 6 or 7 when I started playing the DOS versions of X-Wing and Tie-Fighter with my friend Christian. We were huge Star Wars nerds and his family had a computer (my family wouldn’t get one until I was 10).

A lot of our time would be spent playing outside in the woods by his house, but when that wasn’t the case we’d play those games on his computer (I think we even tried Warcraft once). I was hooked on that feeling of being in this grand galactic war and helping the Rebel Alliance OR the Galactic Empire set up for what would happen in the movies. Those moments at Christian’s house set the stage for my love of video games.

Still looks like that mostly. Grain Silos are actually gone.

Sharpsville Indiana is a tiny town that never fit with me, or I never fit with it. I always make it a point to say I wasn’t born there, even if I did most of my growing up in that town. I take after my mom. I’m creative, love exploring, and have a talent for writing. Sharpsville and the surrounding area was like a prison for me. I was the new, shy, nerd kid who was picked on often. That lasted from the day I started school at Tri-Central in 1997 until I was a junior in 2003. I was basically one of the boys from Stranger Things for 6 years.

Video games were an escape from reality for me, but it wasn’t the output that kept me sane and would eventually steer me towards my career. That was drawing. I didn’t discover it on my own, I was introduced to it by my best friend, Caleb Harvey. Around the age of 13 I realized that I was bored in my classes, and looking back on it probably suffered from depression. Caleb was a new student and I saw that he drew in class. We eventually struck up a friendship and I started learning to draw. He went on to take art classes in school and continually improve his skills while I took band and had to draw on my own. I was getting better but much more slowly than he. That trend would never fade.

In fact, Caleb introduced me to Anime, WinMX, Metallica, Photoshop, and pretty much a lot of what would help define me as a person. As school wore on, I gravitated towards digital media (Photoshop, Windows Movie Maker, etc.) and he gravitated towards music. It is not a stretch to say that without Caleb, I would be a completely different person in a completely different field.

For a time, I thought he and I would go on to Purdue together and end up working in the game industry in some capacity. That didn’t happen. We both did go to Purdue, but were separated by a few years (he started out at the Kokomo branch of Indiana University). Not much else played out that way. He played to his strongest talent, languages. Caleb was an excellent French student in High School and often would attempt to pick up Chinese, Japanese, and even some Korean on his own. His brain was (and probably is still) wired to quickly connect common threads and weed out the junk when it comes to learning a language.

Caleb now lives and works in Hong Kong with the Hong Kong SAR doing…government stuff I think. I was certainly the less talented artist of the two of us and I’m the one doing the art. That is an example of how strange life can be.

Once you start working in the game industry, you lean that everyone has their own weird story about how they got started. The “old guys”, anyone who got started in the late 70’s or early 80’s, usually have some really wild tales of how they fell into the industry. Back then, games were not nearly as big as they are now and the industry was very small. People who got started either came from other industries or were the friends of friends who played Dungeons and Dragons in a group together. It was like this for a number of Silicon Valley companies, and it was no different for games. It was truly the wild west.

My age bracket, those of us in our early 30’s, had a different path to learning how to do digital art. We grew up alongside the internet, as we were born before it and remember a time without it, but also have spent most of our years with the internet in one form or another. We had a limited version of the world at our fingertips when compared to anyone who’s 15 today. For example, anyone can download a trial or educational version of Maya today. In 2002, I didn’t know what Maya was. I had no idea what to search for. Unlike today, the internet in 2002 didn’t have communities that were easy to access for someone who lived in the middle of nowhere. You had to know where to look. I was decidedly not on the cutting edge of the internet revolution (other than having cable fairly early). I knew about Photoshop, Movie Maker, and a few other programs and I put them to good use creating Anime Music Videos and cool Video Projects for school, but it wasn’t until I went to college where I would learn about Maya and how to 3D model.

All of these seemingly minor parts of my history have led me to where I am today. I’ve had a knack for learning and absorbing information from others who are more experienced and talented than I am and turning those lessons into something that I can use in my own way. Other lessons, especially the ones I’ve learned professionally through immaturity and failure, have been quite humbling. I’ve also learned the most from them.

A winter sunset from the office of Sony Bend overlooking the Old Mill District.

The list of places I’ve worked contracts for is pretty long, and each one has its own lesson. I learned a lot about the technical side of creating models at Sony Bend, as well as the importance of a good attitude. Golden Abyss remains one of my favorite projects to this day. There was a group of us who were new hires to work on the game and we went out almost every weekend towards the end of development. It was great to have that friends group there, and sad that I had to eventually leave.

Bend also had a second lesson that I didn’t really learn until I could look back at it from the eyes of a more experienced man: party more in college. I would occasionally get too wrapped up in the Thursday Drinking session that would happen after work. A lot of the main staff and a number of us contractors would go out for beers on Thursday. I, and occasionally some of the contractors, would stay out just a bit too long. This resulted in a number of hung over Fridays, and even a few times when I would not make it in to work because I couldn’t get out of bed. I toted the line between ‘inexperienced but dedicated artist’ and ’kid who hasn’t grown up’. I had a lot of fun in Bend, sometimes too much fun.

I think the biggest lesson I learned came from my time at WB Games in Needham, Massachusetts. It took a bit of time to realize, but I didn’t like WB. When I moved from Oregon in 2012 I expected that they would have similar technology and workflows. I had also shipped a launch game on Sony’s newest portable system and thought I was awesome. I was going to come in and set their worlds on fire.

I did not.

View of Boston from a formerly empty lot close to The North End.

They used old technology, old workflows, were stubbornly hierarchical, had poor communication, and under paid numerous artists, myself included. This led to my attitude quickly going sour after a few months, as the Boston area is very expensive compared to Oregon and I felt taken advantage of. I was about six or so months into my contract when they got something right, hiring an Art Director who was honest and outside the sphere of influence of the studio leadership. Turbine hired him to work on a demo to pitch to WB corporate, and I was put on the team for it. Through a lot of back and forth on some assets, I was eventually pulled into a meeting where the Art Director let me know that I was stubborn, difficult to work with, and had a poor attitude. My immediate reaction was that of someone who had yet to fully grasp how to internalize. “Who said that? Who thinks these things about me” After that conversation, I went to my actual boss. Earlier in the week he mentioned that they were going to have to start letting some of the ‘Temps’ go in the near future due to some legal reasons WB Corporate was cracking down on. I went into his office and told him that he should let me go first as I’m looking for a new job anyway.

It was a genius move (add a healthy dose of sarcasm). My contract was ended a month or two later and I went on to be unemployed for many months. It was during this rough stretch that I started learning the lessons I need to when I was told of my flaws. I was humbled. I looked at what I could change, and I started making those changes.

That art director and I are on good terms these days. I put my head down and just did the work he ask for not long after our talk and looked at myself in the mirror just enough to chill out. He actually took the time to talk to me during my last week at WB to give me some tips and offer to help me out if I needed it. I ran into him at GDC a few years ago and everything was quite pleasant.

In a way, one of the dumbest moves of my career probably ended up being one of the smarter ones long term. Eventually I was forced to bet on myself after months of unemployment and failed art tests. I became what I am today, a freelancer. I needed to learn lessons at an even faster rate. I needed to use new technologies faster, work on my customer service, my business acumen, and always ask what the client wants and not what I think is best. Instead of being about my ego, everything became about the client’s needs.

Mostly. I’m still an artist after all!

I stayed in the Boston area after my layoff from Turbine. I eventually moved in with my girlfriend and was in the heart of Brookline, which isn’t technically part of Boston but if you look on the map it really should be. I sold my car, cut my costs, and slowly but surely, business started picking up. The first few months of living with my girlfriend, I only paid the extra cash that the nicest landlord in the universe, Jacob, requested. Within a few months I had a healthy number of gigs and was able to fully split the rent and bills with her and have been ever since.

Token shot of Yawkey Way

I love Boston to this day. I credit my move to the Northeast with helping me grow up, and my shift to working as a freelancer as helping build my business acumen as well as my asset building skills. All good things eventually come to an end, and living in Boston was no different. My girlfriend was looking for a new job and found a very good one in Wilmington, Delaware. Neither of us wanted to live there, so we settled on moving to Philadelphia.

View of the city from Bok, a bar in South Philly. Looks far, but that’s about a half hour on foot to downtown.

It took a little while, but I’m doing what I love from what has just become the 6th most populous city in the United States. Philadelphia was actually the 5th before, but Phoenix passed it in 2016. I came from a town of about 500 or so, and a school where my graduating class was 70. Philadelphia has a population of 1.5 Million people. I’ve made it.

I need to mention that Phoenix is way too hot for me. I’d never go outside.

Part of what I love about working in Philly is that I’m making game art on my own terms from a city that has a very small game development scene. It’s rarely anyone’s first choice to move to Philly to work in games, but the few of us who are here find ways to make a living and be happy. I also enjoy that the community here is small and could explode at any time with the right set of circumstances. Philly has some other benefits as well, like being on the east coast yet not costing nearly as much as other cities (Boston, New York, DC, I’m looking at you). The weather suits me just fine, and there are street festivals and beer gardens all the time during the summer. Philadelphia knows how to have fun.

The Mummers Post Parade…Parade on Two Street.

There are other threads and lines to connect that relate to why I’m here in Philadelphia and not in LA or Seattle, but what’s unique about me is how I get to create art and work on my terms. I get to work with small indie teams or larger art outsourcing studios. My location is very close to a large airport, so I have convenient flights to the majority of the country when I work away from home and New York City is a train ride away. I get to create art on my terms from my home, in a huge city that I love.

As a final thought, part of the reason I’ve managed to have any sort of success as an adult is because I’m an expert at bashing my head against the wall. I have a drive to succeed and never quit at anything I set out to do, regardless of how many times I fail. And I certainly have failed. This has led to some incredibly gut wrenching moments professionally, but it’s also what allows me to succeed in a city like Philadelphia, where my success is mostly up to me.

Here’s a prime example of what I mean from my high school years. I was a wrestler for my final two years of school (which probably coincided with the end to being bullied). I didn’t have the knowledge or physical maturity some of my teammates had but I had a degree of mental toughness and grit that few did. It lead my coach to nickname me ‘The Vietnam Vet’ and for my teammates to respect me for my attitude. That toughness led me to overcome an opponent who I did not match up very well with to win the Hoosier Heartland Conference Championship at the 135lb weight class. My opponent was taller and thus longer than I was. I am built like a box, so I tended to struggle against wrestlers with lanky builds even when I had a strength advantage. In this match, I don’t remember being appreciably stronger than my opponent. I just remember the look in his face when I finally overcame his multiple pinning attempts and stuck him.

“I’m done with this guy, he can have it. Also ouch”

All it takes is a lot of head banging, and a little bit of learning.