Introduction

My name is Metin Seven. I'm a Dutch designer and digital sculptor with long-standing experience in illustration, visualization, animation, character creation, graphic design, pixel artwork and game development.

   Game developer

Emerging from the 1980s Commodore demo scene as a youngster, I was among the earliest game developers in the Netherlands, creating 16-bit games and music editors with two partners.

   Starting in the pre-internet era, we traveled to the UK and Germany to visit computer shows and approach publishers. Our productions were published worldwide on diskettes, and received positively by international game magazines, such as The One (UK) and Amiga World (USA). Titles include Hoi and Clockwiser. Platforms include Amiga, CD32 console, MS-DOS and Windows. Among our publishers was the British Thalamus, known from classic Commodore 64 games. More info can be found in the Team Hoi game developers section of my LinkStack page.

   Magazine author and editor

In 1989, while still in college, I became a columnist and reviewer of games, applications and hardware for Amiga Magazine, the only printed magazine for Amiga computer users in the Netherlands and Belgium. After graduating, I worked as an editor at Amiga Magazine's publisher, Divo.

   All issues of Amiga Magazine can be found in my Internet Archive. When Amiga Magazine was discontinued following the demise of Commodore, I continued writing for Dutch computer magazines, such as PC Magazine and PC-Active magazine.

   TV show animator

In 1990 I began working as a freelancer in the Amsterdam-based studio of the Comic House illustration and animation agency, while continuing to work on games in my spare time. At Comic House I worked on game graphics, animation for commercials and an animated children's television series titled Mannetje & Mannetje (VPRO), featuring two well-known Dutch comic creators: Peter de Wit and Hanco Kolk. The series was created entirely digitally, which was a novelty at the time.

   In the decade that followed, I created a variety of graphics and animations for games and television, including another children's TV series: TattleToons, again for VPRO. Tattletoons was the world's first TV series where kids could interactively influence the story development via internet, and was featured in the March 2001 issue of Time Magazine as a pioneering interactive television project. In the same year Tattletoons won an EMMA television and multimedia award at the Milia festival in Cannes.

   Web developer

In 1995 I had the opportunity to establish a semi-independent game development division at the Dutch Valkieser multimedia company, together with a partner. We named it The Games Department, and started creating a Windows platform game called Moon Child. During Moon Child development, the World Wide Web was emerging, and I used HTML and JavaScript to create a website for The Games Department. Web development remained one of my activities. When Moon Child was about to be published on CD-ROM in 1997, I created a promotional site with Macromedia Flash 1.0.

   3D illustrator and cartoonist

In the late 1990s my work transitioned from pixel art to 3D graphics for CD-ROM games and applications. I returned to freelancing, using my one-man company name Seven's Heaven as an alias. Being an avid 3D Studio Max user at the time, I was the only Dutch member of Discreet's core Max alpha / beta testing team, contributed artwork to the printed Max manual, and wrote a MaxScript to automate functions of the V-Ray 3D renderer.

   Around 2000 I started creating 3D illustrations in various styles for a range of printed magazines and newspapers. Additionally, in the mid-2000s I became a news cartoonist for the Dutch national newspaper NRC.next and the national news site NU.nl. According to the public NU.nl statistics at the time, the cartoons were sometimes viewed around 70,000 times a day, and the NRC.next newspaper reached more than 300,000 Dutch and Flemish readers each day.

   Comic creator and toy designer

Also in the mid-2000s I created a cartoon-style 3D comic strip series about a Scottish sheep: Seamour Sheep. The comic was published in the NRC.next newspaper, and vinyl toys and USB lamps were derived from the characters, manufactured in Hong Kong. The products were exhibited at Asian toy expositions (Dimension 2007 in Hong Kong, Taipei Toy Fair 2008) and sold in designer vinyl toy stores around the world. In January 2009, the Seamour Sheep comic became a finalist in a comic strip competition issued by the Dutch national newspaper De Pers.

   Subsequently, my work shifted to 3D modeling and visualization jobs for toy producers in the 2010s. Projects included 3D toy figure sculpting of Minions and Spies in Disguise animation characters for supermarket promotion campaigns.

   Blender journalist and Technical Artist

In 2018 I started writing for Blender Nation, a news platform dedicated to the open source graphics creation tool Blender. Following that, I worked as a Technical Artist for the Blender Foundation in the early 2020s. My activities included the creation of a Cycles 3D renderer demonstration and benchmark scene titled Monster Under the Bed, feature demo scene administration, asset creation and collection, Blender.org site co-maintenance, Blender wiki co-maintenance, feature testing, bug reporting and reproduction, Blender Developer Talk forum moderation, establishing communication between the Blender community and developers, and various assisting tasks.

   SDF 3D advocate

Since 2021, I enjoy contributing to the development and promotion of SDF 3D applications. SDF stands for Signed Distance Fields, a volume-oriented 3D modeling method that offers more creative freedom than polygonal modeling or NURBS-based solid modeling.

   My thoughts on generative "AI"

I'm glad generative "AI" was not a thing yet during the vast majority of my career. A number of realizations arose while exploring generative LLMs…

• Letting AI generate things for you (images, text, music, …) lacks a challenge or fulfillment. Using gen-AI provides no genuine satisfaction or pride, as generating is not creating. It's like regarding the results of an online search as your own creations. There's no sense of achievement, no rewarding creative trajectory, no exploration of your problem-solving potential.
• Generative AI is based on tons of hard work stolen from creatives, without consent, credit or compensation. If you appreciate art, support the actual human artists, not the thieves of their labor.
• Gen-AI results are often bland, soulless and easily recognizable as AI-generated, reducing thousands of absorbed unique human styles to a generic average, effectively degenerating art.
• Generative AI can have a devaluating and demotivating effect on human artistry. These days people are increasingly assuming something is AI-generated, and asking which AI or prompt was used. Gen-AI is dehumanizing and industrializing craftsmanship. Creating art is about exploring and expressing who you are, while using gen-AI is asking a chatbot to spit out the combined efforts of many artists on behalf of you.
• AI processing requires lots of energy, water and other resources, increasing the scarcity and price of those resources, and degrading the already fragile environment.
• Unless you're using a fully local LLM configuration, every bit of data you submit decreases your privacy, and contributes to the power and reach of corporations and governments.
• Generative AI enables deepfakes that are widely used for abuse, deception, misinformation and fake news, polluting science advancement and justice.
• Train your brain to keep it healthy, just like any other part of your body. Increasingly leaving tasks up to chatbots and gen-AI makes your brain lazy, and will result in a decline of skills, problem-solving capacity and mental fitness. Challenging your brain is essential to develop and maintain mental agility, and to avoid increasing AI dependency.

I'm not against positive applications of Machine Learning, such as finding patterns in large data sets for medical science advancement and improved weather forecasts. I also welcome useful ML tools that merely aid your own work, such as denoising models that allow to reach a proper 3D rendering result in less time.