About 3dCognition

The man behind the pages

My name is Brad Strong and 3dcognition.com is a natural evolution of my love of learning, teaching, and everything having to do with design and development. I have been teaching digital design classes for nearly twenty years now. My last position in the US was in 2006 at the Art Institute of Colorado, teaching animation, modeling, texturing, and game development. Currently I am teaching a wide range of multimedia courses at Karlstad University in Sweden. Through teaching, I have become fascinated by theory and its practical application to design, animation, and game development. Check out the Theory pages to see what I've come up with so far.

In 2007 I wrote a book called Creating Game Art for 3D Engines which provides a step-by-step guide for using 3ds Max to create game art. The book CD has over 90 minutes of video tutorials on creating and implementing game art. If you like this site, please consider buying the book so that I can spend more hours creating these learning assets.

For those who have purchased the book - I've created a big, fat, bonus tutorial on how to rig and animate a Bones-based character (a spider in this case). The book provides passwords to access the bonus tutorial. I'm planning to leave this 200-megabyte, 90+ minute video tutorial up until the end of 2010. Added to this you get the Spider (bones-based) 3ds Max file, and the Robot (biped-based) 3ds Max file, both tuned for the Unity game engine. Find out more about the book and bonus files here. Check out the Bonus Bones-Rigging/Animation Tutorial here. Also I made two short excerpts from the Bones-Rigging/Animation tutorial available here.

If the Torque engine is your engine of choice, the export tips in the book apply to TGE, TGEA, and Torque 3D, which all use the same DTS exporter.

In the spring of 2009, I stumbled upon the Unity 3D game engine and spent a few enjoyable months evaluating it. The interface is super-slick. Unity just recently made the basic engine free, so there's no excuse for not checking it out if game development is your thing. If the Unity 3D engine is your engine of choice, I have created a free video tutorial on how to bring Biped art assets from 3ds Max into Unity3D. Check out the Max to Unity video tutorial here.

You can learn more about the Unity and Torque engines by visiting the Game Development page.

I also make 2D and 3D learning games using Flash and Unity. The games page is down for awhile while I make some updates but it should be up again by the end of 2010.

Thanks for stopping by 3dcognition.com, and if you have questions, suggestions, or comments, please use the contact page.