ABSTRACT
A: Before working at PDI/Dreamworks, I worked for 10 years at a technology startup creating our in-house animation software and supervising projects ranging from a tour of the interior of the human body for a herpes medicine to Barbie’s Magic Hair Styler, but my real interest was CG character animation. Back in the ancient past when I went to college, the state of the art in computer graphics was laughably primitive by today’s standards. For example, I worked on Tektronix vector graphic terminals where you had to press a button to clear the screen! In those days, there were only a few colleges in the United States where you could specialize in computer graphics, with Ohio State University being the best known. And you could forget about any home use: Both the hardware and software were prohibitively expensive, costing as much as a house! Nowadays, powerful graphics computers are cheap and ubiquitous and software like Autodesk Maya is widely available.
