3 Weeks later I quit my job and had to stay home after suffering some major pains from my crohns symptoms. I had lost so much weight and I was also suffering from a dip in depression. I basically looked like a crack addict how badly I was that time because I was so thin. 

Armor, created by Fernando Vega, animated by Gerardo

But this gave me time to focus and put together the video. I wanted to impress Fernando and Sean at the time by my discovery on making the characters move. I was basically obsessed in making an impression, I lost so much sleep over it. I then had it ready by the end of April and was able to showcase it one Saturday afternoon at the computer clubhouse. Everyone keep saying I had way too much time on my hands, but I perfectly used it to improve myself in this field to better express my ideas. This is when I got the letter in the mail and was accepted to go to the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. 

The previous year I graduated High School but didn’t know exactly where to go. The pressure from family had me extremely worried but I took a year off to concentrate in getting better at making 3D art and finding a way to fix my life then. I felt at a loss because even though I graduated high school first, the pressures reflecting my sister going to college made me push to find something soon. Fernando surprised me by passing me a catalogue booklet from Academy of Art, and seeing big names like Sega, Konami, and even universal printed on it made me want to head over to california. 

Getting the letter from the school really helped my mood get better, and I prepared myself for 2 months to getting there. That year I turned 20, but regardless my cousin, who turned 21, pushed me to drink with him. That was the first time I had a drink of some beer and rum, and also hid from patrol officers in the bush when they were around lol

Anyways, that time was everything, and making that video first before college was the end of me making anything 3D because I signed up for Motion Pictures/Film degree as I was too dumb to pass the exam to get into 3D field then. I just wanted to leave home as well, since my sister was doing the same. Sibling competition there for sure because my family members were just overly bad with pressure at that time.

The next time I make anything 3D is in 2002, as I started learning how to make games using GameMaker and RPG maker 95/2000. This prompts me in continuing creating Dark Ball (Dark Zeta now) in 3D and finishing up on the first chapter to the comic book series. In 1997 I used Macromedia Extreme 3D to animate Dark in 3D. I thought having to do so I would learn, but then stopped once I was finished with the desert fight. That’s when I incorporated him in other works, then finally restarting on it in 2002 in 3d Studio Max, renaming the series as Dark Sphere. 

Next up, Dark Sphere and the many RPGs ideas I had… 

In a year after the revolutionary Nintendo 64 had released, I was learning how to recreate scenes I’ve seen, at the moment exclusively on TV, on the computer. How you questioned? I pirated software from the local after school computer program called the Computer Clubhouse when I was just 16 years old. In this time, me and two other friends embarked in learning how to understand and do the impossible on something that nobody ever thought it could work on.

The first system I was managing to use to do such thing was on an Intel x86 processor that was as fast as molasses. It was clocked at 75 MHz, with Shadow RAM memory of 8MB and 4MB of video ram was firstly introduced that was dedicated for special high quality graphics. It contained as well the first mass market hard drive capacity of 1GB. At that time it was unheard of to see such a thing. I managed to fill it up in less than 3 months with all the work I was doing on it.

I was also introduced to JPGs for the first time as the graphic format I had output to was Bitmaps. This of course all for the sake of learning it as I was blessed to be in a lower middle class hispanic family. The software i first used was Macromedia Extreme 3D. It gave me a glimpse of all the trials I would have to face and made me much more strong willed to persevere as it was then riddled with bugs and limits that would make anyone cry for their mother. 

It was fun for me to see things fly across the screen and learn what the definition of the shapes and forms were. It’s nuts how so much work I put in and yet, lost a huge set of it due to the hard drive failure years later. It was always hard to maintain and keep things around that’s for sure, but that didn’t bother me much as my focus went in the direction of game creation now.