Almost ten years, apparently :S

When I last posted here regularly, I was writing mostly about 3D modelling, rendering and my first adventures with Unreal Engine. A few things have happened since then!

Professionally, much of that time has been spent working with 3D cities. I continued my journey as a photogrammetrist and 3D modeller at Vertex Modelling, before eventually moving into development and becoming Lead Unreal Engine Developer at AccuCities.

And, perhaps surprisingly given how much has changed, a lot of the things I work with today aren’t that far removed from what I used to write about here!

Luckily, there is still plenty of 3D modelling. There is certainly plenty of Unreal Engine. But, on the side and over the years, that has also led me deeper into programming, maths, geometry, optimization, real-time rendering and all sorts of other problems that I would probably have struggled to imagine when I started this blog.

So I thought… why not start writing about them again?

Back to learning

One of the funny things about working in this field is discovering just how useful some of the things we learn at school and university actually are. Vectors and trigonometry might feel rather abstract at first, so it’s great to finally have a good reason to put the dot product to use when working in Unreal.

The same goes for programming, coordinate systems, and the actual construction of a 3D mesh. Even relatively simple maths can become incredibly powerful once you know why you need them!

That’s something I’d particularly like these new posts to reflect. Alongside showing some of the things we’re building at AccuCities, I’d like to occasionally take a step backwards and look at the ideas behind them: what problem are we trying to solve, what do we need to understand to solve it, and why might that knowledge be useful to someone learning this stuff today?

So if you’re a university student, a 3D artist beginning to explore development, or simply someone wondering why on Earth you were made to learn trigonometry… hopefully there will be something here for you too.

So, what’s next?

I’m going to try to make this a regular series, looking at some of the projects and tools I get to work on — mostly around 3D cities, Unreal Engine and the various technical problems that appear somewhere in between.

Some posts will probably be fairly technical. Others less so. And whenever there’s an interesting bit of maths, programming or 3D theory hiding underneath something we’re building, I’ll try to dig into that too.

After almost ten years, I think that’s enough of an introduction. Hopefully the next post isn’t in ten years time either.

Let’s see where this goes!