3DTotal : Hi, could you tell us a bit about yourself?
James Ku : My name is James Ku. I’m a professional CG artist working in the gaming related industry. I’m 26 years old and live and work in the Boston area. I’ve been doing CG for almost ten years now, though for four of those years I was at university and didn’t get to do as much CG as I would have liked. Now I work for a small company called Whatif Productions developing content for our next gen real-time engine.

3DTotal : What first got you started in 3D?
James Ku : I first got into CG in high school when I was about 16 years old. My school participated in an engineering competition called US FIRST (it’s just called FIRST now). It was a competition designed to promote engineering to high school students by pairing them up with a company or university to build a remote controlled machine to play a game, usually something like placing a ball into a basket etc.

 
   

Anyway Autodesk was a big sponsor and gave every team a free copy of AutoCAD (version 11 then) and their new 3d software at the time – 3D Studio Max v1.0. I was in charge of helping to design the parts that we needed to machine so I first did 3d modeling with AutoCAD but soon I moved to using 3ds max and have been using it since. It’s been really wild to see how 3ds max has matured from 1.0 to its current incarnation as 8.0.

3DTotal : You majored in Biology Johns Hopkins University and then went do to pursue a career in 3D. What do you think you would have done if you didn't choose the career that you have?
James Ku : Well I think I should start by saying that I’m Asian, Chinese to be exact. And I think that many Asian kids would agree with me when I say that as an Asian child of immigrant parents, you basically have 3 choices in what you’re going to do when you grow up, you can be a) a lawyer, b) a doctor, or c) some sort of engineer. Anyway Asian parents (especially immigrant parents like mine) are obsessively concerned with the success

of their children. They indoctrinate their children from a very young age to choose, what they perceive to be, stable high paying jobs. The mistake that they often make is equating money with stability and happiness. This indoctrination was mainly why I decided to do a biology major at Johns Hopkins University and to try to go to medical school.
Anyway, back to your question, to be honest I have no idea what I would have done if I didn’t choose doing CG as a career. The options were quiet bleak to me. Hopkins is one of the top 15
   
 
universities in the United States and back when I graduated I knew I didn’t want to go to school anymore.I had seen in my four years how there was basically no sense of cooperation between all these brilliant hard working kids. There was only the idea that for one person to succeed another had to fail. They often dress this idea up by using words like “grading on a curve” or “Gaussian distribution” and “standard deviations”, but don’t be fooled, the way it works is that for every person who does well another person has to fail. I was definitely done with that. So it was either more of the same in medical school or graduate school, or I could go work at some biotech company. The problem is, without a PhD, at those companies basically you’re just a lab monkey. You clean test tubes and turn knobs on a machine that’s probably
   
worth more to the company than your life. At the time I was lucky enough to have met someone who helped me to get an internship at a game company, Big Huge Games. I met some great people there I learned quite a bit there, not about CG, but about working at a game company. It was there that I realized I could do CG as a career. It wasn’t much of an option after that; I had to make it happen. One of the best things about Big Huge Games was that the artists let me sit with them when they were reviewing demo reels. I saw just how brutal that could be and saw the level of work that I had to be doing to break in. So after that I spent 3-4 months working 80 hour weeks to develop my demo reel. It was risky; I spent my entire small life savings from summer jobs in high school to support myself while I
   
 
completed my reel. After that it took another few months of interviewing and finally I got my job where I work now. To be honest I’m not sure there was much of a choice. I think we just are who we are, and there’s only so long we can pretend.