A prosaic description of what I did through the years

I was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada.

I learned to draw very early with my mother who was a painter artist. I still have those (very) old books coming from her father (her father was a painter artist too) explaining drawing, painting and lettering techniques. Already at around 10 years old I was obsessive with details like wood grains in my drawings.

Electronics apprentice

I also had interest in mechanics and electricity. After playing a couple hour with the battery driven toys I received as gifts, I dismanteled and rebuilt them several times untill there were so many missing parts that they wouldn't work anymore. So my parents quickly came to the conclusion that I was going to be happier with toys which I could use to build things like mechano and all the variety of blocs kits.

When I discovered, at my school library, a set of books, with electricity and basic electronics courses, I not only borrowed them but manually copied them so that I could refer to them afterward. Then, my neighbor who learned that I loved electronics, gave me a full box, 2 or 3 years worth of "Popular Electronics" and "Radio-Electronics" magazines. It kept me buzy for several years.

Still very young, when I was coming back from school, I used to walk in the backstreets and pick all the radio and TV carcass that were trown in the garbages. I would bring them at my tiny "electronic laboratory" that I installed in our shed in the backyard and I would carefully unsolder all the electronics components and save them for future electronics projects. At one point, I went with someone who was unsing a truck to gather all the metal garbages in the backstreets to sell. To pay me, he would just let me pile TV and radio sets that we found. The jubilation.

I've built several HI-FI amplifiers with all those parts and one AM radio transmiter. At one point I modified a TV so that it could function like a large osciloscope.

Rock band musician

In the 60s, when pop bands were a fad, I bought an electric guitar and learned to play guitar. I have built numerous guitar amplifiers each more powerfull than the previous ones. While in a hard-Rock band (playing songs by Jimmy Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Deap Purple, Cream, and several others) I was having fun building Sound Effects apparatus for the band. I built aparatus like a fuzz box, a wawa pedal, a reverb that I built with a spring taken out of one of those rolling blinds, and an echo box that I built with tape recorder parts.

I also enjoyed the many years playing with the band where we performed in country discotheques and clubs. But eventually, we broke the band and splitted. Some of the other band members became brother in law. During this time I whent to college to study electronics but my knowledge of electronics was already way ahead of whatever was teached at the college and I eventually found it boring to the max. I nevertheless got out of it with an electronic technician diploma.

Comics artist

After the fun with the band faded, I got my pencils and papers out again and started drawing characters for fun. Anything that came out of my imagination. After I felt confident and had draw a couple comics, I started to draw a complete comic books à la european style meaning 8-1/2 x 11" and 64 pages and published it. The book is "Louis Cyr dans les pattes de McSohmer". The whole book is now scanned and available online here.

Those where the 70's. At one point, I met some peoples who where publishing an alternative magazine / Newspaper and I started drawing comix and other illustrations for the newspaper. There, I learned how to handle the photostats camera, how to develop films and do color separations, how to do the paste-up with the wax and haow to do page layout, even how to handle the printing press.

Then, with two members from this newspaper, we created a comics publishing company and published two years worth of comics (or rather "comix") magazine. I actually printed the first two issues on that Gestetner printer that I learned to use previously. This was not enough to earn our living though. So we also accepted contracts for reproduction photography (we had the equipment), illustrations, page makeup and paste-ups for external editors.

My First Computers and 3D Software Engineering

Then we splited appart and I started doing freelance illustration works. I specialized in diaporamas with hand drawn comix characters that where used to sell products or services. My cute small rounded happy-go-lucky comics characters became so popular that I became overwhelmed with commissioned work.

During this time, I once saw on TV, an interview of two Belgian artists who where showing their "art and computers" at the local contemporary art museum. I whent to the museum the next day and spent the whole day with the two artists. We where mostly alone most of the day so they took great pleasure, it seemed, explaining me how they did what they did, which was basically writing Fortran programs that drove Tectronix terminal to display abstract pieces of art. When I came back home from this experience, I knew I was going to use a computer to make art in the future. What I had in mind was not so much abstract art but perspective drawings. Although I was a maniac of perfect perspective when I drew landscapes, buildings and any scene, I always felt that the process of drawing in perspective was very arduous and I thought the computer would be a fine tool to help with the perspective.

So I bought myself a Z-80 starter kit which I built myself and used it to try to do exactly that. Alas, the starter kit was not equiped with a keyboard and a display, It was only programmable in hexadecimal and had only 2k of memory. So I had to build the extension cards that could drive a display terminal and that could read data from a keyboard. This took a long time and I was far from my goal of producing art with my new tool. Programming in hexadecimal involved writing the asembly language in a notebook and then translating the assembly language into exadecimal using the CPU reference book and calculating the jumps and calls offsets. Monk work.

Eventually I kind of got fed-up with the task of self marketing, and more importantly, payment collection that is involved with freelancing. And furthermore, I wanted to have more time to spend on my new toy which was the computer. So I got a job at the yellow-pages to do yellow-pages advertisements.

During this Yellow-Pages episode, I also built the driving circuits that could take the digital data coming out of the S-100 port and convert it to analog signal that I then used to drive an oscilloscope. I was doing art at last. This aquired technical knowledge allowed me to meet with someone who was doing laser projected advertisements and I did a couple ones of those advertisement on the side. But I found it such a hurdle that I quickly abandonned that.

I eventually bought an [URL=http://oldcomputers.net/sorcerer.html]Exidy Sorcerer[/URL] computer. This computer could be programed in Basic. What a relief. I hooked it to the Z-80 starter kit which was becoming quite well equiped. And I started writing 3D application interfaces which could accept data to drive the oscilloscope instead of programming each display.

My first Computer Graphics Animation

When IBM released their PC, I bought one with the cassette tape storage device. This PC had a port which was designed to turn ON or OFF the cassette drive. I used this port to drive a circuit which advanced a super-8mm shot-by-shot camera and did my first 3D animation film with it.

The animation was simply my initials in coarse blocked wireframe which traveled toward the camera following a spline path all in perfect glorious perspective. I had even implemented ease-in and ease-out for it. Unfortunately, because I wanted to have an easy transportable way to show my animation, I decided to store the 8mm film inside a cassette designed for a toy that was used to play loop animations of Marvel superheroes. At my first use, I was not aware of it, but the film got all packed in the cassette instead of looping and it immediately became unusable. So I am the only one to have ever seen this animation.

In those years, because the yellow-pages office was near a unversity, I spent several nights for several months at the University library, looking for Computer Graphics papers (SIGGRAPH proceedings, Transaction of the ACM, IEEE Computer Graphics, Transaction on Graphics, etc.) and photocopying them to read at home, on the bus and in the subway while traveling back and forth to work.

Software Company Owner

Eventually, I started a software company with two friends, We developped accounting applications and other non-interresting application of this sort. When back at home, I started developing a complete 3D application which included data entry through a Talos graphic tablet and high resolution (640x480, 256 colors) display on a Number-9 graphics card. The application was first programmed in Pascal and eventually got translated in C. I did several simple scenes and rendered them in all their dithered color glory.

The accounting company closed because the bank took out all their financing and credit margin from us. At this time, the bankers strongly believed that this computer thing was a fad and that it would quickly disapear. They called that "the computer slump". They came to believe that because they observed several well known hardware and software companies go bankrupt and they panicked and took their money back before we would, suposedly, go bankrupt.

Robotics Engineering

After a hiatus of a couple years in selling hardware and software, I got a job at a company which was developing a system to sell a services on the Canadian Teletext called Alex, a NAPLPS protocol based on Telidon. As a member of the team, I had the task of designing the UI, all encoded in NAPLPS. I had some fun encoding animations in NAPLPS.

Then I got an offer from a sibling company to work in their robotic division. This is where I had the most fun. The crazy things we did there. For instance, I designed, using a CAD application, a whole skeleton for an android. I had one of those plastic real size skeleton in my office from which I'd base my skeleton.

And then I built the skeleton myself using the tools available in their machine shop and some synthetic material that came in 2"x18"x48" panels. I felt like I had received a huge mechano kit to play with. The life size skeleton, once the tendons were attached, could stand up by itself.

This is also at this company that I developed autonomous navigation systems for weeled robots based on neural networks which got their environment sensing data from ultrasound sensors attached all around the robot platform.

During my robotic period, I stopped developing my own 3D application and started doing 3D illustrations with POV-Ray. Later I tried Imagine but found working with polygons a real pain and barely could do what I wanted with it.

Multimedia and Neural Networks

When this company closed, I did a couple freelance jobs untill I got a job at Micro-Intel which later became Cogniscience. Last time a did a detailed resume of all the projects I worked on there, it took 29 pages so I will not go into details here. Basically, we did multimedia, interactive CD-ROMS designed for learning and later, e-learning. This was really my first job where I could merge and use my two skills sets, graphics / ilustrations and programming. And I did a lot of both during my 12 years there.

It is during the Micro-Intel years that I decided to enroll to a masters degree in mathematics and computer science. I did my thesis about the use of neural networks to detect and replace missing values in databases. And for the thesis, I developped a neural-network application that could hook onto databases, build a neural-network model based on the designated input fileds and their attributes and visualize the clustering of the dataset in the neural network inside layers.

At one point, I felt I was not doing enough illustration and painting stuffs so I enrolled at a local pastel classes and I participated at Web based drawing workshop such as "Shade Glines drawing jams"and "Belle Workshop" for a while. Enough to get back some of my skills at hand drawing and painting.

It is for an early project at Micro-Intel that I had them buy Animation:Master v2. With it and next versions, I did 3D illustrations or animations for about 8 interactive multimedia projects and 1 short animation video. But when we switched to building on-line e-learning applications, the interest for 3D stuff sadly faded away in the company. We did use some other 3D packages during those years, most notably TrueSpace and Strata. But I always returned to A:M for its simplicity and its flexibility.

The 2001 "dot com" financial crash had a huge impact on the multimedia industry and Micro-Intel / Cogniscience was hit quite hard. Customers became hard to find. The company managed to survive untill early 2004 when all the assets were bought by IsacSoft Inc. I was layoff late 2003.

In 2004 I got a project design and management contract from IsacSoft for a composite picture application. I previously did similar Composite Picture applications design and development at Micro-Intel. Those were some of the fun projects and I could design several clever image manipulation algorithms to handle the huge image composition and transformation tasks. Those algorithms also became the basis for other products with similar image composition requirements such as on-line glasses try-on services etc. Unfortunately, this last project did not last for long. When the lawyers started fighting everything was put on hold indefinitely.

As an artist, I used to draw and paint a sort of standardized feautifull face that I developped through the years. While working on those composite picture applications, all the people involved on the development team, of which there were several artists, used to build their own canonical beautifull face and they were all different from my own "beautifull face". This project tought me that facial beauty is all in the proportions harmony. That was a revelation and today, thanks to this project, I can now draw different types of beautifull faces.

During my last years at Micro-Intel, I was deeply involved in learning and following the world wide e-learning metadata standardization efforts and became an expert in that domain. I started doing commissioned work for the universities in the province of Québec in late 2004 to early 2006. Those commissions were mostly technology analysis and reports writing with recommendations.

Back to 3D Software Engineering

In late 2004, I was also offered a programmer job for Hash Inc, maker of the Animation:Master 3D animation software. I worked there for a 3 years contract, programming different rendering technologies such as Soft Shadows, Soft Reflections, Ambiance Occlusion, Image Based Lighting, Photon Mapping based Global Illumination and Subsurface Scattering, plus several other improvements and software maintenance. I also worked on multithreading the application on the Macintosh.

Working at Hash Inc also allowed me to participate in the design and production of an animated feature film where I also animated several shots. I could also use my comics experience, which was realistic in style, to mentor some of the apprentice animator on a Open-Movie project. This experience gave me enough confidence to start producing a short animated film that I had on my back-burner for 4 years. And the funny thing is that now that I have this experience, I get all sort of scenarii ideas for animated shorts from scenes I observe and discussions I have.

Well, that's it for now. I think I already wrote too much already anyway.