I'm 47, born in Australia but raised in Sweden, worked for 10 years as a freelancing illustrator, most of that in Hong Kong, these last 12 years in computer graphics.

People often ask how or why I got started with cg. Computers have fascinated me since I was a kid. Not unusual today, but this was the 60's, in a very small town. I read about computers in science fiction. Creating things in a computer was one of my dreams. 1990 I bought a pc with AutoCad.

Then I found Silicon Graphics, in a murky crowded office in Hong Kong. I bought a used 4D20 'Personal Iris', without Z-buffer, with a 200 Mb harddisk, and some free demo software. It was a brown box the size of a suitcase, most laptops today can run rings around it, 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 used Alias Quickmodel and Wavefronts Personal Visualizer, bundled free with the computer. Then I found Alias Animator, and later upgraded to the Indigo box, and to Power Animator, and I stuck with that until they discontinued PA, when I switched to Maya, and pc's.

In Hong Kong 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 - 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. I had a 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!)

I got my first job in cg 1996 with a small company named Optimage then, later Optidigit. Back then it was in the middle of the Central district, right below Hollywood Road. And when I say below, that's literal - the streets that go inland there run up an incline that sometimes is so steep the whole street is a staircase. The world's longest escalator was built there, and part of it ran 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. But it took over a year to get the visa papers. We moved in April -99. 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. Ironically, after at first feeling relieved, I missed Hong Kong (and Asia in general).

Since 1996 I'd been working on a realistic female character. The years -00 and -01 saw 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' wonderful work came out. But even though I've largely given up the pursuit of a perfect virtual actress, I like to remember the fact that 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... lots more. It's just a fun memory now, since the dot-com bust and other factors caused the shelving of the project. But I still like to remember it, since I don't have much other credits to my name yet.
2002 I moved back to Asia, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and joined my old company Optidigit.
2005 Optidigit closed, I went back to freelancing.

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. I was invited to hold a talk to the 3d artists at Disney Feature Animation in August 2004. 2005 I was invited to lecture in Singapore again, this time by Alias. I later won the Maya Masters Award. In 2006 I first lectured in Taiwan, then held a 2-week workshop in that Danish 3d school again. I've held 5 sold-out workshops online.

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