About me . . . I'm 45, born in Australia but grown up in Sweden, father of these two beautiful boys Leo and Daniel, worked for 10 years as a freelancing illustrator, most of that in Hong Kong, these last 11 years in computer graphics.

Computers have fascinated me since I was a kid. Not unusual today, but this was the 60's in a very small town. I found out about computers and what they might be able to do one day, from the science fiction I devoured, from about 7 on up.
As a teen, 1978, I thought of a program that would make human models, pose them and light them. Creating things in a computer was one of my dreams.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to start fulfilling it until 1990, when I bought a pc with AutoCad.

I had time to build one model - a Stuka bomber - before I found Silicon Graphics, in a dark crowded office on Hennessy Road in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. Clueless, I bought what the SGI dealer offered me - a used 4D20 'Personal Iris', their lowest end model, without Z-buffer, with a 200 Mb harddisk, and some free demo software. It was an ugly dark brown box the size of a small suitcase, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. And I thought it was a bargain for almost 13,000US$. (In today's value probably more like double that.)

I tried the free BRML-CAD at first, a solid modeller used by the US military. Boy, those were the fun days, the sense of adventure, the experimenting, the magic... For output I was taking images with my camera off the monitor! I also used Alias Quickmodel and Wavefronts Personal Visualizer, which were bundled for free with the computer. Then I found Alias Animator, and later I upgraded to the Indigo box, and to Power Animator, and I stuck with that until just recently, when I've switched to Alias Maya, and XP.

People sometimes ask me what Hong Kong was like. To me it was hectic, frantic, claustrophobic, exotic, noisy, smelly... rents are second highest in the world, and it has a surprisingly boring nightlife and cultural life. Good news: it has a wonderful variety of foods, cheap and easy transport, no grafitti, no alcoholics or drug addicts in the streets, just some tourists in an ocean of hardworking busy people... "Nice place to visit - wouldn't wanna live here", is what we thought, my wife and I, the first time we came here (from the deep empty whispering forests of northern Sweden).

But its electric 24-hour buzz grows on you... Now I miss it. I found work, lots of freelance income with low tax - good news is this enabled me to buy very expensive computer stuff as I mentioned above, bad news is 8 years of it burned me out on illustration. Even worse news is cg paid less than illustration, but that's what I wanted to do, so obviously - after a few years, when I decided to go fulltime into cg - my finances took a nosedive. They never reached the same level again either, I suspect that I couldn't do it again even if I tried; today is a completely different situation for illustrators. Not just in Hong Kong, but all over the world.

I lived on an island much larger than Hong Kong island itself, but with only a few small towns on it: mine was Discovery Bay, which is great when you have kids - population about 15,000, looks like a university campus, or that place in the TV-series "The Prisoner". No cars allowed, only buses and golf carts. Situated right next to the airport. 50% foreigners makes it very cosmopolitan. Gallery 2 contains a cg rendering I did of the view from my 16th floor livingroom window.
Here's a photo of me in my huge home studio in Hong Kong - one corner of our living room. (And my wife ran a kindergarten in the house every day from 9 to 12!)

So I fiddled at home for several years, in my meagre spare time, just getting into walk cycles when I got my first job in cg, back in -96, with a small company now situated in Kuala Lumpur (doing mostly commercials). Named Optimage then, now Optidigit. Back then it was smack in the middle of the wonderful Central district, right below Hollywood Road. And when I say below, that's literally - the streets that go inland run up a steep incline that sometimes is so steep the whole street has to become a staircase, and can't be used for cars. Recently the world's longest escalator was built in Central, and part of it ran right there on Cochrane Street, 2 yards from my office window. I must have seen more people's legs floating past behind my monitor in those few years, than in all the rest of my life put together.
In late -97 I was offered a job with Digital Anvil, Austin, Texas, based on my web page (I really love the internet!), and since I was close to bankruptcy and a little tired of HK after 10 years, I took a chance and accepted. But it took over a year to get the visa papers. Me and my family moved in April -99: if you never heard of Austin before, it's a very nice place. Many of my foreign friends confuse it with Houston - it's not, though it's relatively close by. Austin is the Capital of Texas, with the largest university in the country, but still a fairly small city, with water and grass and trees all over the place, and known as the live music capital of the world.  It's also the home of Sandra Bullock, Willie Nelson and Roberto Rodriguez, and right next to San Antonio (home of the Alamo, Newtek, and Siggraph 2002).
Ironically, after at first feeling relieved, I missed Hong Kong (and Asia in general). (I also missed Sweden -
In -00 I went back to Sweden for a "high school" reunion (for Swedes graduation is at 15) for the classes of -75, in my tiny little home town of Bollnäs. I won the prize of most distant visitor.

Since 1996 I'd been working on a realistic female character. The years -00 and -01 witnessed an explosion of great work in this field. Where before there was nothing except a few so-so corporate projects, now suddenly all these single artists started popping up with wonderful work. I was first in the world to have a virtual character sponsored by a major modeling agency (Elite) back in -99, and presented to the world in a press conference, appearing on ABC, BBC, and many other tv channels, as well as in over twenty magazines and newspapers that I know of - including NYT, Financial Times, WSJ - and lots more. It's just a fun memory now, though, since the dot-com bust and other factors caused the shelving of the project.
2002 I moved back to Asia, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and joined my old company Optidigit.
2005 Optidigit closed, I went back to freelancing.


This site contains most of the art I've done in PA and Maya and Photoshop the last years decade or so, most of the character stuff anyway, plus some tutorials, and a screenplay.
Credits and awards: 1998 I won Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica. Some of my internet awards are listed on the index page. 2000 I had an animation cycling at an exhibition in the Technical Museum in Stockholm. I was invited to speak and teach at the Singapore Animation Fiesta in 2000, and later that year also at a CADCAM clothing convention in Treviso, Italy. I have taught at the MultiMedia University in Melacca, and I held a course for the professors in cg at Singapore University. At Siggraph 2001 I held a seminar for Alias/Wavefront, and later that year for their December 3 event (in Chicago) I presented the same seminar. 2003 I held a seminar at a school in Copenhagen, and a couple demos at the 3D Festival there, held at the same time. I was invited to hold a talk to the 3d artists at Disney Feature Animation in August 2004.  
Please read the FAQ page before you mail - if you have technical questions, also first check out the tutorials, and CGTalk.com.

Me and my wife are of the Baha'i Faith, to find out more look here.
Let me just give you a quote (from the copious writings of the Persian prophet/founder Baha'u'llah, died in imprisonment 1892):

"Women and men have been and will always be equal in the sight of God...
Verily God created women for men, and men for women."

When I first read that, I found it an amazing sentiment for that time and place - Persia (now Iran), over a hundred years ago!