A message from the founder of Illumin8

[BiznessMan]

Hey guys
I spent some time a while back trying to track down some of the 3dmm team members and ended up finding the guy who owned Illumin8. I got in contact with him a few months ago and he finally replied this morning and offered to give some insight on his experience working on 3dmm. Here is what he had to say

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While I had hoped that it would allow nascent filmmakers to develop their skills, I had little feedback about the game after completing production. I understand it had a dedicated fan base and that it won some media awards and even an internal Microsoft award for being the only game to be done on time and on budget up until the time of its completion.

The people in the links you sent (Socrates video) were mostly unfamiliar to me except the producer Renee Louise April who I worked closely with along with a man named Narindra who was the Microsoft technical lead as I recall. There was a quick shot in one of the links that looked like Jean-Jacque Trembley who was responsible for the pre-rendered animation of the host character.

I knew Jean-Jacque from my time as a Director at Softimage Inc. Softimage was a Montreal based software company that developed the 3D animation programs which was used in the development of 3DMM. When I left Softimage, my girlfriend Brigitte Samson and I set up Illumin8 Digital Pictures Inc. in Seattle Washington and 3DMM was one of our first big contracts. There wasn’t a lot of skilled 3D artists around at that time so after a few unproductive attempts at hiring a larger team for the project, we changed our strategy to focusing on developing the most efficient production pipeline possible and split the brunt of the work between Brigitte and myself. Since I was a faster 3D artist, I took the work of creating the game environments and Brigitte handled the character animations within the game. I think we both worked on the various prop models.

Thinking back on the project, the thing that strikes me most was the severe limitations we were under technically. The tiny polygon count for the character models had us debating over the details of where to spend the limited amounts. We used every trick we could come up with to get the most out of the memory, polygon, and bitmap limits. Sorry, it was a long time ago and I can’t seem to come up with any appropriately amusing anecdotes.

As I recall the production took place over a 6-month period when Brigitte and I were completely dedicated to the production of the game. We rented a house in West Seattle that overlooked Puget Sound and set up production there. I recall a few times production was interrupted by watching large pods of Orca Whales swim by. We had a very detailed and tight production schedule that we stuck to with tenacity. At the beginning of production when the animation began to lag behind schedule, I remember buying a cooking timer for Brigitte to set to the time allotted in the production schedule for each animation. After an initial tooling and ramp up period, the two of us we were able to produce unheard of amounts of quality game content within the allotted time.

We were a close team that believed in the game and worked efficiently to accomplish a great deal. Renee was always very energetic and charming, usually fueled by quadruple shot lattes and Narindra was resourceful and focused on efficiently getting our content integrated into the game. I have fond memories of the time I spent working on 3DMM and am pleased so many people enjoyed it

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Just for the record. No he does not have any assets/source code/models/textures/etc. Please don't track him down and pester him with those types of request. He was generous enough to share his experience working on the game which is more than I could have asked for.

[Old Rivers]

Woah this is awesome. Good job dude!

Also I am beginning to understand why so many of the 3dmm characters have unusual names.

[PizzaLuigi]

interesting

[Dave Miles]

Cool thread, thanks for sharing