Paul Tosca: In the first years of school, my parents used to send me to all the local school contests in math and Romanian (my native tongue) and I used to study with my parents at home a couple of hours more per day or on weekends for these Olympiads. It was like a pain in the neck at the beginning, but after the years had passed, I realized that this helped me a lot. Later on in high school, I became interested in physics and things got more serious; I started studying math and physics on a deeper level. I participated annually at National Level Olympiads and in the final year, managed to become a member of the Enlarged Romanian National Team of Physics in 2001. After high school, I chose not to pursue a spot in the Physics Faculty due to the lack of jobs in this area in my country. So I studied computers and programming instead (Automation and Computers, Computer Science Department in Bucharest) and was looking forward to becoming a programmer.

Paul Tosca: Somewhere in the third year of my studies, "The Lord of the Rings" movie hit the screens and I was impressed with what could be done with computers for special effects at the time -- especially in the last installment, "The Return of The King". I had no knowledge of 2D/3D whatsoever, but loved the trilogy so much (CG effects in particular) that I watched it over and over again and then one day, I decided this was what I would like to do for a living ... pretty far from what I had spent so many years preparing for -- but I thought to give it a shot and started gathering all the information I could about the movie. I gathered all the "making-of's" I could find on the Internet, investigated which studios had worked on the CG visuals, what software did they use, the process involved, etc.

Paul Tosca: Well, you never know what the future holds -- but for now I am more interested in the visual arts for games.

Paul Tosca: I didn't know what I wanted to do (modeling, texturing, animation, etc.), but I figured that I should start somewhere and over time, I'll probably have a better idea of what it is I enjoy. I started with a 3D package and played around with modeling and some lighting/rendering. At that time, Maya was not so popular amongst 3D enthusiasts, but the fact that some big studios were using Maya – that made me start learning this package. In the beginning, I was like everyone else -- hundreds of tests with boxes and spheres .

I have to admit, that my background in math/physics/programming helped me a lot when it came to lighting/rendering and other more technical aspects that you're bound to encounter with every 2D/3D package. For instance, I could easily understand how a renderer works and what those bunch of parameters in all the menus stand for, and what sort of impact they have on the final image.

Paul Tosca: When I first put my hands on Maya and started learning 3D, I thought, "…heh…it's just another software package -- probably within a couple of years I can learn it in its entirety". Then I discovered that the processes involved are much more complicated and each field was rapidly expanding and evolving while I was learning and that the knowledge is substantially more vast than I had thought initially.

Paul Tosca: I was in the third year of study (I had two more years until graduation) and it was not wise to drop out and take up another field of study -- e.g. design or art for instance. In fact, this was not a good choice anyway, because in the design schools of Romania, you will find that barely any 3D packages exist.

I thought a better way would be to find a job where I could work and learn 3D while at the same time earning some income. In my last two years of study at the faculty, I got a fulltime job at one of the few game studios here in Bucharest -- AMC Studio. During those two years, boy did I learn a lot! They really have some talented people there.

After I finished my studies, I left AMC Studio to work freelance fulltime.

Paul Tosca: Well, I started as a character texturing artist but my skills in this matter were almost zero in the beginning, but kept learning and improving and, later, I moved to modeling/sculpting. Also, I mainly worked as a character artist but did some vehicles, props, high poly renders or whatever was needed.

Regarding the titles I worked for, I am afraid I cannot tell you more than what can be found on their website (http://www.amc.ro).

Paul Tosca: This is my entry for "The Dominance War II", a game character competition. I was going to do a game character for my portfolio and this competition came at the right moment.

Paul Tosca: Thanks for the appreciation.

In the beginning, I had intended to do a male character with no pet but then decided to go with full specs and thought a woman with a pet would have more appeal. There were four teams you could join -- I chose the evil side, Evil Shadow to be more exact. Also, I had to choose some proficiencies for the character. I went with sharp shooting, hence the bow and since the character will most likely do range attacks, the pet would come to complement the close attack in the situation where the enemy will come closer.

Regarding the missing breast dilemma, there were some unhappy guys on the forum I had activated during the competition, and a serious discussion emerged whether the "chopping" of the right breast will improve the wielding of the bow or not…anyway, my point was that I just wanted to let the viewer know Varga is not the casual chick. She would have nothing standing in her way to becoming a more proficient shooter, even as extreme as removing parts of her body that others would like to see.

The pet started out as a cat (used some lioness references in the beginning) and then changed it gradually to a dog, didn't quite like it … then tried like a big rat … and after many tweaks, it ended up as you see it now, some sort of cat-rat-dog named Umbra.

Paul Tosca: Almost a month from concept to finished renderings (one week for concepts, two weeks for modeling/texturing and another week for posing/rendering final images) this project had my full attention at the time. I postponed other paid work so that I could finish this character, but it was fun and I did learn/try new things during the process.

Paul Tosca: The main 3D package used was Maya for modeling, UVs, texture baking (normals and AO from high res) and rendering; I used Mudbox for sculpting the high res versions, Topogun to rebuild the topology and Photoshop for textures.

Paul Tosca: I used Zbrush (v2) a lot at work and when I started working on Varga, I was very tempted by the Maya-like navigation of Mudbox. I saw in the presentation movies (I do not like at all the Zbrush way of navigating … its really frustrating sometimes) and loved how the flatten and smooth brushes work within Mudbox, layers and other cool stuff Mudbox came up with.

I have to agree that the software can be learned easily, at least I managed to go through all the docs and testing within a day, the program has a very simple learning curve. I like it so much probably because I am a Maya shop and many features inside Mudbox are similar to the Maya interface (viewport navigation, stamp controls, etc.).

Paul Tosca: Tough question …

-better support for multithreading (for multiple cores/CPUs platforms)

-texturing tools

-introduction of marking menus /quick gestures (like the ones found within Maya )

Paul Tosca: At the moment there are a few game developers here in Romania (including PC/consoles/ and mobile games) and there is nothing serious regarding film studios. But you can find great talent here nonetheless. The big problem here is that there are fewer opportunities to learn 3D in schools. Years will have to pass until we can see something similar to VFS here, and most of the talented people you can find in Romania are self-taught.

Regarding the salaries in the 3D scene, I would be ashamed to tell the figures some serious game developers offer -- but I won't beat around the bush … It's a common thing in Romania. You can find good and cheap resources here. The good thing is that more and more big studios from all over the world are beginning to heavily outsource work where they can find better and cheaper services.

Paul Tosca: I do not have any great advice to give from my own experience, but check out some books that were written on this subject. They offer more experience and documentation than what I can say on this matter – try "Getting a Job in CG: Real Advice from Reel People" – I enjoyed reading this book and found it quite helpful.

Paul Tosca: When I left AMC, my goal was to find some cool MMOG project, to work on as a character artist. I may have found it but can't talk about it at the moment :-(.

This year I also started to do some 2D drawing and I am looking forward to working as a concept artist as well -- but there are a lot of miles ahead.

Paul Tosca: Thank you very much, it was my pleasure.