Interview: Bob McKain

Posted on April 21st, 2011
Website http://www.foundation3d.com/

Bob McKain is a long standing friend and leader of the 3d community at Foundation 3D. He's been working on 3D projects for a long time now with professional contacts throughout the industry, but his main and earliest hobby is photography.

Thanks for taking the time to go through this interview Bob, I'm sure there are quite a few people out there that would like to read it.

Hi Matt, thanks for the interview and that’s right. Photography was where I really first learned to enjoy an art medium.  Trying to capture what I see in such a way that it inspires others is what I enjoy most about the medium. It’s fun to take pictures but I found it most enjoyable when someone else felt like they were there. To me that’s the best result.
I started photography clear back in Jr. High (seventh grade) and it wasn’t until the release of the Amiga computer that I started to see what could be done with computer art and eventually the Video Toaster which gave way to Lightwave 3D for me. I guess that was a span of about thirty years? Wow.

     

My favorite aunt from Texas gave me her old Argus C-3 which I still have. I was bit from the very first, being able to snap moments in time. I was fortunate enough to carry my photography into high school where I learned to develop my film and prints. That opened up a whole new avenue for me in creativity. Learning to manipulate the print process made me look at taking pictures differently as well. I started doing double exposures at the time as well as playing with extreme exposures.

   

It certainly gave me a love for art but I think it has been both a blessing and a curse, especially now that we have digital. I think it’s way too easy to get into an instant mentality and that has caused me a lot of what I like to call project build up. It’s only been recently that I’ve learned to have a little more patience and see a project through. The blessing is that I never seem to give up or get enough. I’m always awed when someone can pull off work that fools me into thinking its real. I think a lot of us try to recreate in 3D what we see in life. It’s almost masochistic when you think about it. :)

 

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… oh wrong story.

The real story is we started as a sub-group of the SFA forums. At the time LW wasn’t getting much attention and there were quite a few of us. I convinced the admins of the site to lets us start doing LW conversions of the models and we got labeled “The Lightwave Group”. Before SFA met its demise we produced an animation that was viewed at a French Star Trek convention and we gained some notoriety with that. When I could see that SFA was not going to survive I took the responsibility for setting up our own server and the rest is pretty much history.

   

There were a lot of reasons. When I started the site I knew nothing about servers, security, bandwidth, usability and friendliness or policies or being an admin. LWG got the short end of the stick because of that. The biggest hit was a hack after about our first year that completely destroyed our historical archives and then the second time just after Foundation 3D went live the old LWG server crashed and died. But the old site needed a face lift and we needed to grow beyond ourselves. Many of our best members were moving into professional 3D positions and being required to use apps other than LW. Because we were LW centric we were missing out on some fantastic work. It wasn’t easy convincing our admins at the time that it was time for a major change but eventually we all came to a point where we could see the 3D landscape changing and that we needed to change with it or become a dinosaur. Foundation 3D was born of that understanding and the desire to provide something more, something of more value to our members.

 

LOL, don’t! :p  If I were to do it over I would only do it if I had the disposable income to sink about forty grand into it from the beginning. Servers, programming, promotion, asset creation, legal work, professional alliances and on and on. There’s a lot to consider and a lot for one person to do.

 

Making MO money! Seriously, I have never experienced such a severe economic challenge. When you lose half of your income stream and end up working for less than a fifth of what you were making it will challenge your budgeting abilities. It’s challenged everything from my self worth to my core beliefs and my determination to keep a site like this running. I would say my main interests at the moment are primarily developing my photography into a viable income stream and secondarily continuing to develop F3D to the point where it is completely self sufficient outside of my income stream.

   

Ahh, project bloat! Yeah, I’ve had more than my fair share but as I mentioned previously I’ve been cured.  I’ve dropped from roughly twenty in completed projects to just seven. The main reason is learning to be more patient with the development of a project and I would say to be more perseverant. Rendering and texturing has always been a weakness and learning to work through difficult issues and allow others to help me learn the solution have been key to retiring many projects.

      

In years about seven, in man hours I would say closer to eight months.

Many things happened during those seven years and unfortunately I allowed those things to stop me from enjoying my hobby and love for what I do.

This tip or advice might come a little early but if I could say one thing to that would be to never allow anyone or any circumstance to rob you of your joy. That can only happen if you give the permission and that is completely under your control. It was a tough lesson for me to learn and hopefully one I won’t forget.

   

Like many, I’ve been a Trekki to some degree ever since I was old enough to see Star Trek. Especially with the movies I was enamored with the refitted Enterprise and the –A. I used to think about what it would be like to travel the universe in a ship like that. I was still naive then and reality shows us we probably won’t be able to travel like that for centuries but your imagination is a wonderful thing. It’s those imaginations that really drove me to fall for the technology in Star Trek and to want to build one for myself.

 

Not really, I have recently found a bunch of the old WIP render I did along the way but without the text to accompany them they really don’t mean much now. I tried to recapture some of it in the WIP thread on Foundation 3D but it is the only place to view the work that went into it now.

   

Isn’t there always? I would say yes, I haven’t done the bridge and there are certain aspects of the engineering hull that bother me. A version 2 would address both of those issues as well as the shuttle bay doors which aren’t articulated in the current version. I’ve already corrected a couple of oversights with V. 1.1 which are covered in the release thread:

http://www.foundation3d.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8904

I’ve sort of covered this already but let me see if I can be a little clearer about it. Most likely you will take on 3D for your own enjoyment. I can’t stress enough to keep a learning attitude and an open mind, often times even the newest convert to the hobby will have an eloquent solution to a problem that you are overlooking. And then be patient with the project, don’t rush it just to get something out the door. Speed will come with practice and time until then enjoy the project and the journey. Next don’t let anyone rob you of your enjoyment, there are many pessimists and outright jerks in the world, let them bark, just keep moving. Finally don’t take on something that you feel you can’t do, often those types of projects will leave you discouraged and immobilized. Do what you want and enjoy and hang the rest.
Right now I am taking my own advice and just dinking around with some fifties era stuff I’ve had a hankering to do. None of these are hero models but they look good rendered and they will fit into a fifties scene at some point. As individual projects they aren’t much but together I’m hoping they will fit together into something much larger.

From a larger project view I have a couple of things I really still want to explore in animation. Rather than jinx the project I would just rather say I am waiting for a couple of items to fall into place so I can start pursuing it in earnest. But it does involve a certain starship of our acquaintance.

From a photographic standpoint I am guessing I have about a year before things really start taking off. Like running a 3D site, I had and still have much to learn. I’ve been taking classes from some of the masters as my pocket book allows and I continue to improve with each portrait session. Much will ultimately depend on what the economy does. Portraits are a luxury item and while there are still people with money they are more conservative about their funds now than two years ago. But good work will always have a market provided the world doesn’t collapse so I am pressing forward with the ultimate goal of fitting into that market.

  

Thanks Matt, it’s been fun and I wish you the best in your endeavors with your new site.

Bob McKain is a professional photographer and 3D graphic artist located in Boise, Idaho, and can be contacted for commissions at either Foundation 3D (www.foundation3d.com) or via his photography portfolio site www.bmckain.net.