ABOUT Nikkie McDade
After obtaining a BTEC National Diploma in Technical Illustration and Design at Blackpool and the Fylde College- Nikkie McDade graduated from Bournemouth University NCCA with a BA(hons) degree in Computer Visualisation and Animation.
From there she has worked in many areas surrounding the 2D/3D industry, including: 3D tracker and technical modeller for Framestore-CFC on the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; character animator, modeller, film editor and all round 2D/3D person for an educational software company; and as an architectural visualiser both within a company and freelance. She also runs a cards and crafts company called Eikeda with which she takes on making cards plus other stationary/gift items for weddings and other events. She even offers her sevices as a face painter at various fairs and functions.

As an artistic person, she prides herself in keeping her traditional art skills alive and regularly paints, crafts and sculpts in her free time- constantly adding to the ever growing pile of sketch books! She values its importance because how else are you going to know about weighting characters, lighting and proportions and other classic elements without this extra attention? Some of her artwork is available to view in the traditional artwork section of this site.

Programs:
Nikkie uses several different programs to create her 3D work. The main programs she uses are:
Vectorworks- Vectorworks is a purpose built archtiecturally based program that is exceptionally accurate and has many import/export options but shows off in the CAD drawing side of things by allowing extremely accurate imports of files. This is particularly useful as most architects these days use some form of CAD drawing package to create their plans.
Artlantis- Artlantis is a rendering package that allows for easy texture and lighting placement, ray tracing and camera movements.
Maya- Maya is a fully 3D package application and isn't used so much in her architectural visualisations unless something needs to move within the fly-though/over. It's mostly used for animations and other 3D, non-architectural, jobs.
Photoshop- Photoshop is image editing software. The short description of what this software is used for is that it creates the textures and for editing the final rendered images.
Majority of these programs can easily import/export into each other as well as into other pieces of software. For compatibility with your own software please send her a couple of files from your own software and she'll see if they work in unison.