Cool to hear and inspiring thread.

I was about 7 when I first felt an obsession to program and design games. We saved up to buy a Commodore 64 and a few years later I was merrily making my first games, just for my own amusement. Then I went on with the Atari 520st and wrote games in GFA basic. Often I would get lost pursuing interesting ideas that my computer didn't have RAM to handle so many games ended up half-finished when memory dropped low. Then I continued with Lua, C and later C#.

My primary passion was always creating art so I have had long periods going back and forth between art and programming. In 2005 I became interested in deepening myself in 3D modeling after StarWars Battlefront II (Pandemic) was released with some cool mod-tools. So I started with XSI Softimage and learned how to model functional game assets. I probably modeled 20+ buildings in Tatooine style for my own maps. Every asset needed a high poly mesh, low poly mesh, collision mesh and an optional shadow-casting mesh. At that time the collision mesh was made from primitives like boxes and cones that you set up to approximate the game model shape with. Faults in the mesh would cause collision problems and then you had to munge all the assets over again.

I'm quite happy with this Scifi helmet I modeled in Blender + Zbrush, about 2 months of work:

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/space/other/scifi-helmet-a89a6dcd-8ccb-4c69-b076-35149fc2b50d