About
Jean-Francois Charbonneau is a modeler and technical artist based in Toronto and Ottawa Canada. His collision with 3D arts came early in 1993 when he first encountered Lightwave 3D as an extra-curricular activity in his Visual Arts concentration program. There he perfected the art of public performance 3D animation for the school fundraisers, utilizing facilities at the local community television station to master his animations to tape, one frame at a time . This passion was quickly transformed into consecutive summer jobs and multiple contracts. Enterprising by nature, he followed a less than traditional path of attending the B. Com program at the University of Ottawa. But there again his trajectory was deviated back towards 3D when he put what he had learned in practice and incorporated 3D Creatures.com, a modeling and design company. The work produced for various contracts with Canadian and American companies became his entry into the world of video games, TV and DVD production at Artech Studios. There he has worked since 1999 as Modeler, Senior Modeler / Technical Artist and most recently as Modeling Studio Director. Some of the clients he has worked with include Hasbro, Electronic Arts, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Atari, NewLine Cinema and many more.
Self taught in the field of 3D, his personal research was transformed into several formal college course offered at la Cité collégiale in Ottawa Canada. There he serves as both instructor and program coordinator, helping to shape the 3D Animation program from the ground up. His courses on modeling, advanced modeling and shading / texturing have contributed to producing top quality 3d artists who work today in all areas of the industry including at Ubisoft, Eidos, EA, and the Embasy VFX.
His early exposure in visual arts courses to artistic techniques of antiquity combined with a personal passion for archaeology pushed him back to school this time as a student in 2006 where he completed, in his spare time, an Honours B.A. in Classics. Philologist by training, his appreciation for the creation process and the vestiges of time were infinitely enriched by a life changing experience participating in an archaeological dig in Greece with the University of Montreal.
Finally, in his spare time, Jean-Francois also likes to learn programming languages, an obvious progression from the rigors of classical languages, starting with c in 2002, applying it to mel script and expanding into Maxscript, Python, Javascript and more recently object-oriented languages like Java.