Hello EI Users,
I’d love to hear from you. This thread is to talk about your accomplishments using Electric Image. I’ve used this program in a number of capacities. Final shots for film (Star Wars Ep II & Terminator 3), previsualization (Behind Enemy Lines & K19: The Widowmaker), broadcast design work (Fox Sports and ESPN), and print.
How about you? What do you use EI for?
hi brian and leonard, thanks for setting up this forum here at this great CG resource!!
i’m doing mostly architectural visualizations with EIAS. Electric Image was my first real 3d app, and i started to learn with version 1.5. i bought a licence of 2.5 broadcast (the first affordable version, but still very expensive for me at that time), together with formz, after effects and photoshop, when i started to look at CG as my work. later, a lot more CG tools and 3d apps (especially lightwave, which plays nicely together with EI) added to this basic setup, but animator and camera are still my most used ones when i have to create fast images of high quality 
work hard (yes!), render fast (still true), retire young (too late! LOL)
cheers
markus
Hi Brian.
My name is Richard Joly. I have been working for 28 years as a fireman for the city of Montreal, Canada. 10 years ago I moved to the Training Center. We keep our firemen up to date with all kinds of stuff in a rather large facility. To explain certain concepts and architectural notions usefull for our men, I started, eons ago, doing 3D visualisation with the brand new EIAS 2.0! Been using EI since for all the 3D animations we put in the videos.
http://www.rdn.qc.ca/images/3d-images.jpg
Over the years I became more and more interrested in 3D and started doing work for other clients. I made animations for the last 12 shows for the Montreal’s Planetarium.
http://www.rdn.qc.ca/images/Planetarium.mov
I worked hard, rendered fast and I really will retire young…!
Hey Richard,
Stuff looks good. Glad to hear you’re finding work. 3D has so many applications, the possibilities are unlimited.
I remember when 2.0 came out. I was so excited. lol. I still have old versions of the software and sometimes for grins I open them up just to remind myself how much things have changed.
Hows life in Montreal? I’ll be up there working on a movie in April.
Life in Montreal is whatever you like it to be. Party downtown to the wee hours of the night or a nice stroll in the Old Montreal. Temperature in april should be quite acceptable (for someone living up north…) since you’r from L.A. you should bring a little wool…
A little get together is in order. You are hereby invited for a nice evening in my humble house. We’ll chat over a nice meal, wine and porto… My contact info will follow privately.
English is not my native language so, polish your french…(kidding)
My name is Kurt Fillmore. I’m at the other end of the EIAS scale. I’m a hobbyist, got in with the 3DToolkit and bought my copy of EIAS 5.0 off of E-Bay (felt the need to get Modeler while I could).
I’ve been learning and cranking out a few shots. I’ve used Modeler to design and build a few things around the house including my backyard deck, and a privacy screen for my wife’s teaching desk at her school.
http://home.comcast.net/~787kfillmore/movies.html
Am now enjoying Silo, and hope to get my U.V. mapped models into Animator via OBJ2FACT.
I hope to learn more from this new forum, and contribute when I can as many new users hit the hurdles that I found when I first started.
Hey Kurt…
Welcome to the EI forum. Everyone has to start somewhere. The 3D toolkit is an excellent value and investment for learning animation. My very first 3D program was CAD 3D on the Atari ST. (The forerunner to 3D Studio Max). After that I went onto AIM 3D, Topas, and finally to Electric Image. Been with it ever since, though I’ve also added Maya and a few other packages to my toolkit.
I want to build a thriving EI community. Keep hanging around, you’re bound to learn something.
Brian
Hey Brian,
when you do go to Montreal, don’t forget to go for a smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz
on the main (St-Laurent st). It is quite unique!(not to mention the St-Viateur st bagels…)
My name is Jean-Luc Grenier and I’m a artist painter, sculptor and I use EIAS to research
forms and textures. I love the great render engine and it’s speed.
I’m from Montreal also, but have been in Vancouver for about 18 years.I want to thank you again for starting this forum.
Jean-Luc
www.studiogrenier.com
Richard Joly, bonjour et a la revoyure!
Kurt, I like your simple deck building movie.
Hello averyone!
My name is Vladimir. I actualy interested in EIAS since that moment when I saw “Megapolis” picture. That is fantastic. I’m already downloading EIAS. I know, thats bad, but what can do 17 years student without money if he wants that software?
It is nice to see, that “forum master” is so cool and pleasent person. I guess it will be great.
Good luck for everyone and sorry for my broken English.
Hey Vladimir…
Welcome. EITG provides educational discounts to the software if you are a student.
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/store/edu_store.html
There’s also the 3D toolkit which provides an older version of EI that will help bring you upto speed.
http://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=3dtk
Let me know if you have any questions.
Brian
Thanks Brian for links.
I will try to be an active EIAS forum user and share my emotions and experience (when I get it) with everyone.
And also, I love the atmosphere here
That sort of posts are very much frowned upon at CGTalk. Plenty of threads get closed down once they go down that route. So please Creed, for your own sake and the sake of this brand new forum, don’t ever mention any P2P software. You can’t expect people like myself who actually paid for their copy of EIAS to condone the use of cracked software.
Sorry Brian, I’m not trying to do your job here, just had to get that one of my chest.
Anyway, back on topic. I’m a traditional 2D animator and I bought EIAS a few years ago to teach myself 3D, thinking that 3D would take over the world. That hasn’t happened, in fact I’ve been very busy with my 2D stuff indeed. So much so that I never get around to actually finishing anything in EIAS. Plenty of unfinished ideas scattered on my hard-drive. One day though…
In short, I’m just a 3D-dabbler.
hi, great to see that the voting and brians efforts finally paid off.
thanks!
well, i started using EIAS some years ago at ramjac, learning from the “grand-master” of automotive animation - Jens C. Möller
most of the community will know him, and Patrick, as the creators of Xpressionist, Obj2Fact and rodeo.
two years ago i started my own little freelancing career. EIAS served me well over the years.
oh, and i am the founder of the cult of the bouncing teapots! (rodeo beta test) 
uwe
Well for those who don’t know me, my name is Reuben Flounders and i am also a hobbyist.
I also started out with 3D toolkit and upgraded to v4 pretty quickly, i found that EI was fairly easy to use and the render quality very nice, the work of Malcolm Thain, Paul sherstobitoff and a few others had a big impact on my decision to go with EI, guess i’ve been using EI for about 5 years now and have a pretty good knowledge of the program.
I see myself as approaching pro-level yet there’s still a lot i want to learn, i’m never happy
i’ve produced various tutorials and material for http://www.electro303.com/ and EITG, i’m also part of the beta team
I’m proud of what i’ve achieved so far with EI, starting from nothing really, not greatly educated and i didn’t really know what i wanted to do for about 10 years after finishing school, i discovered “3D” by chance really and have been learning on and off since then, its pretty hard having a fulltime job and family to support and trying to get somewhere with CG on the side, but i’m making progress i think…
Reuben
Those videos certainly made me chuckle Uwe
So, hurray for the forum! I work for an Arch Vis firm in the UK, mostly the second half of the production line (once the model is in Animator right through to compositing/ DVD encoding).
I started doing hobby 3D in EI 6 years ago or there abouts, just using it for graphic elements in my College/Uni work (my degree is in New Media). I was lucky enough to get offered a job using EI the day after I graduated!
You can see some of the work i do here: http://www.watsonassociates.net - Note the website isn’t finished and the gallery is of mostly Pre-GI images - I strongly believe that 6.5 has heralded a second age for EI.
Just as an aside, I do all my modeling in FormZ (zed
Ian
I should add: With the help of a couple of others I am putting together a set of Training DVDs for EI. So, coming soon
Hey Brian and the rest of my fellow EI users!
I’m very happy to see an EI spot for us here in cgtalk.
I’m still bummed about Animation:Master’s forum being removed… but things happen.
I work mainly with industrial clients doing previs work. I use EI for product renderings and would be lost without it.
Brian, thanks for setting up the area!
Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com
I’m stunned! EI has found it’s way to CG Talk! I wonder how many of the other applications that have forums here are older than EI? Glad to see it though.
Curt
Manuel
I very much agree with you. We all know that illegal software exists out there. Its easy to say, “well as long as I’m only learning…its ok.” I also know, that in other countries, obtaining cracked software is a piece of cake. When I was stationed in Korea (when I was on active duty military) I was stunned to see actual computer stores that sold cracked software. They included everything down to a photocopied manual. The internet has only made it worse.
I will update the forum rules and goals to reflect no discussions about obtaining illegal software.
Oh and Creet… I’m not coming down on you. Its easy to be in your shoes. Just try to take advantage of the inexpensive alternatives I listed in my previous post and you’ll probably feel much better about it.
More versatile in classical Music and still more creative to produce some nonsens with Cubase SX and a couple of noble VST-Plugins, i am an more enthousiastic than talented 3D-hobbist. The 3D-app-“career” brought me via ebayed Bryce and Vue to an ebayed EIU5.
Matt Drummond, Tomas Egger and Christobal Vila done their part to hold me, meanwhile my progress working through 3D-Litrature (Lance Evans, Ken Brilliant a.o.) is still quite poor and the stunnig and breathtaking shortfilms, that may lend my musical VST-thoughts a equivalent visual shape are still far.
Here is at least the current state of my Ken Brilliant “digital Human”
http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1139999&Start=1&Artist=fahl5&ByArtist=Yes
Great to find the EIAS-Community with their own Forum at CG now.
Thanks to all reponsible
Steffen
(from Berlin - Hi Markus)