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Hometown: Halifax, UK
Current Location: Leeds, UK
Website: http://www.steve-jones.co.uk
YouTube Page: http://www.youtube.com/eyebath

I first became interested in 3D art when I enrolled for the Games Art & Design course at the Norwich University College of the Arts in 2004. Before then I had never even dabbled with 3D, I was strictly a pen and paper kind of guy, and my only real pursuit was designing characters and creatures.

Silo was the first 3D program I became familiar with, and I have been using it since 2004. I found it's clean interface very friendly and intuitive, by comparison other 3D packages I encountered at that time were daunting in their complexity. In a matter of weeks after learning the basics of 3D modeling, I was creating complex, multi-object scenes, and the fast performance of Silo allowed me to model at satisfactory, responsive speed.

My typical modeling workflow is to take any orthographic drawings or reference into Silo and set them as viewport images before modeling. I typically use Maya side by side with Silo, so any modeled assets are saved as .OBJs, and then brought into Maya. I always have Silo open when working in Maya, as I find it useful to send objects back and forth for refinement (and to create blendshapes, for one example). Working this way tends to be quick and pleasurable, and as Silo is practically no drain on my system's resources, running the programs dually is possible.

Since graduating I have been working freelance with a variety of different media, such as logo design, character design, portraits etc. I was contacted via my YouTube page about the prospect of doing an animated promo for The Lost Levels single 'The Early Sheets'. I immediately agreed after listening to the song, and I began work on it straight away. I relished the opportunity to work with Silo again, and as such my workflow was somewhat different than normal. I found myself using the program to create the pixelated landscapes and characters from day one - I created a series of planes with numerous width and height sections, one for each asset or character, and deleted individual faces until the shape of each object was correct. I found this to be the quickest way of designing everything I needed.

The video itself has been really well received*, and has heralded a new ambition for me, which is to become a one man animated promo creator. I am currently looking for further work in that field, and the ease of using Silo has definitely been a contributing factor to my new direction.

* Video was featured in Computer Arts Projects magazine, issue 117, and was included on the coverdisc. Also featured on the Guardian games blog , and other smaller news outlet websites.

As mentioned before I think where Silo excels is its clean, intuitive interface and extremely good performance even on a computer of moderate specs. It's also an extremely good value-for-money option, which is beneficial for everyone from people on a budget, students, beginners, through to industry professionals. However, Silo's top quality is its reliability - it always does what I tell it to!