I am both honored and excited to share news of a new journey on which my family is embarking. After over forty years living in Columbus, Ohio, I will be saying goodbye to my childhood home. I accepted an offer from Autodesk to work on the Product Management team as one of the Product Owners for 3ds Max in Montreal.

It does seem a little surreal to be moving. Aside from my travels, all my memories are focused on Columbus. All the adventures as a kid riding bikes on the streets of the West Side or roaming the woods and fields along Wilson Road; falling in love with basketball; catching pigeons along the tracks above West Broad Street; mapping out all the local raspberry patches; taking walks with Mom and Dad; going to school; thinking and writing and walking; taking pictures; laughing and eating and drinking; raising kids and chasing dogs…

Columbus has been a great place for me and my family. I will miss it. Certainly, we will be back to visit friends and family; but I suspect that it will never be quite the same. Many of the people I love are not here anymore. Some friends have moved away—off to Missouri and Florida and Arizona and Oregon and Indiana and elsewhere. So many of my loved one have moved on even further… Mom and Dad and Grandpa & Grandma and Chris… further past the range of cell phone towers and text messages.

As bittersweet as it is to leave my home of so long, it’s exciting to be given the opportunity to work at Autodesk. I’ve been interacting with the Max development team for years as a beta tester and charter member; so I’ve gotten to know some of the team from a distance. Getting to know them more intimately is an honor. I look forward to learning new things, facing new challenges and growing new friendships and collaborations.

This move will see a change in the nature of my public work. For many years I’ve been releasing a range of plugins and tools for game development around 3ds Max. Some of those tools have been free, others have been commercial. When the reality of this opportunity finally sunk in, I spent no small portion of my time considering what I would do with that body of work. I had already been struggling with that question because I went through a life-changing health struggle last year that made me contemplate what to do with my work in the event of my death.

For now, I have decided to change my distribution model of all my commercial scripts and tools to be free for the public. I am making this change for several reasons. Among them is the desire to make sure that as many people as possible can continue to take advantage of all the tools I’ve devoted my time to developing. I also want this gesture to be a sign of thanks to all the people who have kindly supported me over the years. Had Wall Worm Model Tools not been embraced so widely and enthusiastically for so long, I may well not have been able to have this wonderful opportunity to work on 3ds Max itself.

I am not ending my development on Wall Worm. I’m just setting it off to the side as it cannot remain my primary focus any more. You can expect to continue to see new updates in Wall Worm, but those updates will probably be less frequent than they have been for the last ten years (often daily).

As soon as I have anything to show off from this adventure, you’ll be sure to hear from me.

Update: As it turned out, COVID-19 closed the border soon after I posted this. I ended up working remotely. Once the border was opened, I started going to Montreal sporadically to meat with my team, but I ended up staying in Ohio.