Hello. Thought I would introduce myself since I’ve been lurking around for the last month, liked what I saw, and joined. My name is Dan Rhoades and I’m from Southern Illinios although I’m currently serving in Iraq. I’ve been here six months. I came over here with a Alienware 7700 laptop and four good books on Max so I could do some learning but the laptop failed after three months of little use. Turned out the motherboard was bad… Bah! Had to send it back to Alienware and then home since I wouldn’t have got it back in time for my departure (mail takes about a month). Ah, well, I turned to the internet to console me. I’ve been to this site before when I was home, but didn’t spend too much time here. Since I’m a “captive” audience over here I’ve discovered what all is offered here and decided it was well worth the money for the membership.
I’ve played around with computer graphics as a hobby since the mid 80s doing sprites on my Commodore 64, SX64, 128 and Amiga systems. I started to play with Photoshop in the late nineties and finally decided to give 3d graphics a go about a year and half or two years ago. I get ready to retire from the military in a year and a half and have convinced the wife for us to make a go of a computer graphics business (she and I are both experianced in photography as well). She has even bought off on my purchase of a high end Boxx workstation in the near future (as soon as we buy our retirement home).
