3DTotal: Hi Thomas, it’s been a little while since we last spoke, back when we were helping you out with a work visa for a high profile job – how did that all go in the end? Can you also tell the readers a little bit about your working/education history and how you got to where you are today? 
Thomas: First of all, let me thank you guys for that again. Acquiring a work visa for the US as a foreigner isn't really a simple process and the companies really need to be behind it for it all to work, but I was in the lucky position of having a really big name supporting me and everything worked out in the end!
 
This industry is really small and I learned over the years that it's a lot like a big (well, a really big) family. You never know who you'll end up working with or who'll inspire you later on. Who'll grow the most, who'll break boundaries. Who'll become a companion or a friend. So my point of view is that it's always good to help one another like you would in a family. Put your ego aside, help and try to inspire others. No good deed goes “unpunished”, especially not in an industry where people usually know one another, thanks to the Internet. That's why it's a special industry and I'm really proud being part of it. 
 
So, about my education and work history. Well, I’ve been drawing since I was little. I started with comic characters and always had a passion for creating my own characters and creations, but it was always just on paper – doodles – and I never thought anything would come of that. As for 3D, I actually started my 3D career way back in 2003 with a trial version of 3ds Max 4.2 or something. I was always fascinated by cinematics, but never would've thought that I'd end up creating them later on.

I can still remember when it clicked for me. I was looking through the 3ds Max help files and found a tutorial about creating a character called Chubby Mc... Something. It explained how to use the MeshSmooth Modifier (basically it's Max's version of Subdivision Surfaces) and the moment I used it, it clicked. 3D suddenly felt organic thanks to the power of Subdivision Surfaces. It felt like sculpting with clay. I still wasn't sure whether or not I'd be smart enough, but I knew that I could move those points around while seeing a smooth surface underneath it to create something that I had in mind.

When I was 12 or 13 years old, CG cinematics had just started to pop up thanks to the advent of the CD as a data-medium for game consoles and companies like Squaresoft and Blizzard starting to compete with one another in terms of ever-increasing cinematic quality. It was beautiful. I remember getting goose-bumps when I first saw the Final Fantasy VII opening cinematic. It was like this new door had opened, like a revolution had just happened, as if the world had changed from one moment to the other. I loved it.

So I started playing around with level editors, always thinking that the "real" 3D animation packages would be too complex to learn. I had a huge amount of respect for everyone who was championing this field, but at that time I thought that you needed to be a programmer or a mathematician to understand and work with these applications and I knew that wasn’t something I could do. Life is funny that way. Looking back the last couple of years, there are at least a handful of industry-standard 3D applications that I helped to shape in the right direction by being a beta tester, working closely with developers and giving them the right technical feedback based on my creative input. I really try to simplify and streamline everything I do; maybe that's why I was so scared of applications like 3ds Max with its gazillions of buttons, modifiers and so on at the beginning. But I also find that that's the kind of attitude that really helps developers make the right decisions for their users.
It's only after you figure out how the “under the hood” stuff works that you stop worrying about the technicalities and really just use the applications as tools.

So, after that, I just started creating. I started working on a couple of hobby projects, already pushing strongly into the field of character modeling. My best amateur moment was probably when I created a couple of characters based on an old Lucas Arts adventure game Day of the Tentacle and a German television show about videogames called NBC Giga broadcast this as big news. I was stunned. My characters were on television!

All of that helped me to shake off that initial fear of me not being smart enough to understand 3d applications. I knew that I was interested in creating characters and since everyone was always saying that a strong traditional background really helped in this field, I started studying art with traditional sculpture as a major, just so that I was able to learn the fundamentals.

My sculpting tutor was this Indian guy who’d been a sculptor for more than 20 years already and he was very open-minded. In general, my world was so small and so closed-up before I started studying, then I got flooded with all this new information, a lot of which I wasn't sure would actually help me to become a better CG Artist at the time. But I got smarter and smarter. I studied hard and really started to understand the basics. It was a lot like throwing away everything I had learned to that point and starting anew. That's what I got from my tuition. I became a much more balanced person, much more open-minded and I learned to stand up for my art and all of that. I ended up visiting philosophy and literature classes. I developed a huge curiosity for any creative endeavor. And it really helped.

Then things moved pretty rapidly. A small outsource studio in my hometown, Vienna, offered me a job as a character artist. They’d seen some of my digital sculptures and liked them. I worked there for eight months or so, but during that time my work got more attention thanks to putting it on forums and developing an online portfolio, so I decided that I'd quit my job at the outsource studio and just start my own freelance business, solely focusing on character and creature art for the games, cinematics and film industries

I liked freelancing for the most part, but I'm not a really good businessman. I think I know marketing and business 101, but I really didn't like the fact that I ended up spending around 50% of my time doing organizational work like dealing with clients, scheduling, emailing and so on. I still had quite a lot of output creatively, but I think every person should focus on exactly what he thinks he's really good at - and so after I got the offer to work as a 3D artist on cinematics for one of those big companies, I took it!
Phew, sorry for such a massive answer! I'm also giving workshops about character creation from time to time and usually that's what people are interested in - how to “make it” in the industry. I don't know if I’ve “made it”, but that's what I've been doing so far and I'm really happy about my decisions.

3DTotal: A little birdie tells me that the “big company” you went to work for last year is none other than Blizzard Entertainment, arguably one of the biggest and best games companies on the planet! That must have been an amazing experience; can you tell us a little bit about your work with Blizzard? Are there any projects you’ve been working on recently that you’re particularly excited about?
Thomas: I've been working for about a year now as a modeler in Blizzard Entertainment’s Cinematics Department and it's quite thrilling. Blizzard is just a big box filled with tons of incredibly talented people divided into different departments that all have the goal of creating something amazing.

Regarding completing assets, the biggest difference here compared to other studios is just the level of scrutiny that is being applied to everything and how much we're iterating until an asset is actually finished. You get constant feedback and I'm always amazed to see how far an asset has come after the iterative process.

Regarding projects - Well, I’ve been working on Starcraft 2 and now that we're almost done things have finally slowed down a bit. I think the other thing I'm passively learning here is how a game like Starcraft is really built - I mean the whole design part of it. The way Blizzard balances games and goes deep into
what the games are all about, fine-tunes every nook and cranny, and top it off with an amazing presentation - I think that's just why people love Blizzard. Starcraft could easily be compared to a classic game like Chess, but with more of that Blizzard-blue awesome sauce.

I don't know how much I'm allowed to share here, but it's definitely an incredible learning experience and I can't wait for the first game I've been part of here to ship and see the response. Can't wait to lurk through the various forums and see how people like it!