Probably not because it was warez. I know people who work with Maya in productions; everybody knows that Maya is crash prone to varying extents. It's the least reliable software I've ever used. It does a TON, and it's otherwise pretty awesome, but it's embarrassingly buggy.

I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school for it. Outside of assignments, I did a bunch of hobby projects both with just animation and sculpting. I was particularly interested in mixing CGI with live action, and there were some things I did with modeling and rigging things like monsters, filming footage, resolving camera motion, and compositing rendered animation into the video. Was both a lot of fun and horribly difficult. These days I it's much easier since software for resolving camera motion has improved by orders of magnitude.

There was a studio I worked at briefly, but it was a pretty crappy deal and I decided to just ditch that field for software development, which I am much better at anyway.

:) It was hard to tell what was what back then.

Thanks for sharing those notes on your character animation background.

I'm curious what drove you to be interested in mixing CGI / live action. Jurassic Park, perhaps?

When I was a kid Roger Rabbit and Cool World were amazing to me. JP's CGI seemed different, as though the dinosaurs were real.

Oh, I also didn't catch this:

> what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?

So I often have hobby projects (that I sometimes complete, heh) where I would rather sketch it out in Blender so I could more easily figure out what it is I want to build. Sure, I could be using something like Solidworks, but I've just never felt like I needed a full on CAD suite to do what I need. The process helps me design physical objects and decide what parts I'll need to either buy or 3D print.

One such example is a 16mm film scanner I've been meaning to build. I have a 16mm projector and collect 16mm films, and some films you can find on eBay are kind of obscure. So I thought it would be fun to build something to scan them since it would use my programming talent and involve controlling stepper motors.

That was actually where I gave up on Maya completely. I had used Blender for some things already so the transition was pretty easy, but I have more experience in Maya overall. After having it crash on something basic, not even potentially weird operations like booleans (which every other 3D software package gets right), I decided to abandon Maya entirely and hopefully I won't ever have to look back.

It was The Incredibles. That and my father was and still is an animator. But The Incredibles really got me interested because it was both pretty advanced for its time and had what I still consider to be a more mature storyline than even most animated films today. I definitely know what you mean about Roger Rabbit!