Artist: Space Station Detail

BACKGROUND

Missouri-based artist Nick Zucarello created these images using Alias|Wavefront's Maya on a Silicon Graphics workstation with 90MB of RAM. He used Adobe Systems' Photoshop on a Macintosh 9600/300 with 700MB of RAM for texture maps and compositing

Nick is a 3D illustrator working for Color Associates (www.colorassociates.com) in St. Louis. He has an associate's degree in art, but is self-taught in computer graphics.

In his own words:

"I've been doing serious 3D for a little over a year. Before that I went to East Central Junior College in Union, Missouri, where there wasn't a computer graphics department. My last semester there I took out a student loan and bought a Power Mac with Photoshop and Hash Inc.'s Animation Master. I then taught myself as much about 3D as I could...The Maya program is so powerful. The only drawback has been the big learning curve and the slow render times. At Color Associates we make large-format trade-show graphics, so most of our renders start out in the neighborhood of 6,000 pixels. We mainly use Electric Image's ElectricImage to render with because it is so fast...In the future, I would like to make 3D characters for video games. The only drawback I can see to doing games right now is the lack of detail. I love doing high-resolution graphics so much that I would hate to see a dithered-down version of my art, but the poly-pushing power of today's game machines is getting to be pretty awesome. I think in about five years we'll see some real-time graphics that will blow our minds.

Nick can be reach at: nickzucc@yahoo.com and his home page is at http://www.pixeltwisters.com/nickz