Alright I'm in.
My first ever mod was on CS:S (I never had access to a PC until I was about 16) I was on my girlfriends brothers computer and I thought it would be hilarious to change out all the audio files for me saying the onomatopoeia ("pew pew pew", "BOOM!" "bang! bang! shoot!" and my favourite for pulling out the knife - "knife"). He didn't see the funny side of it, especially since I overwrote the old files. At this stage I had also tinkered in the Morrowind map editor, the Far Cry 1 map editor (what a great editor) and a few others, and had a penchant for fiddling with the guts of games, but I didn't really know that modding was a 'thing'.
As a young lad I was a free mmorpg whore. My first ever mmorpg experience was watching a friend play Runescape. I never got into it myself but the whole concept enthralled me. I immediately started scouring the net for fun free mmorpgs.
I pretty quickly found
eternal lands, an indie made by a husband/wife team way back in the days of blender 1.9. I played it for a little while and pretty soon I delved into the files to see what made it tick. It was extremely accessible I guess due to it still being in beta at that stage. I started changing filenames to see what would happen and quickly fucked my install, but not before getting a few fun effects like changing all the trees to character models, and the characters to bears. Later I found their map editor and this is where the story really starts.
Maps were handled entirely client side, so you could do what you wanted with a map and play it on a live server, but no one else would see what you saw. I started fucking with the heightmaps and would giggle maniacally as I floated over players on servers and stole loot and generally behaved like a l337 h4x0r ass. I also started to make maps that were far more detailed than the ones in the game (they didn't look much better, they just had more shit in them) and started to feel I was lacking art assets. I sent an email to the developers asking them to make a few models for me (I know right) and got an ever so polite email back pointing me at blender.
So I opened that up. Up till this point I had assumed that 3d modelling programs were all super sophisticated quantum computer applications that only ran on render farms tended by scientists, but here was a (relatively) fully featured modelling program running (relatively) smoothly on my dusty ol geforce 4. I ran through the blender noob to pro, posted like nuts on elysiun.com (now blenderartists.org but remember your roots, dammit) and got every semi decent intermediary build from graphic.all to fiddle with the new features.
About here I found
Wurm Online, back when notch was working on it (aww yeah, we used to chill and shit. Well, we chilled once... briefly). There were hardly any art assets in the game, almost all of the icons were question marks and the models were question mark bags. Good lord did I put some time into this game, I loved the grind. I eventually heard that Mojang were using blender to make models for the game and in a noobish fervor I offered to make ALL THE MODELS. The developers quickly discovered I was bottom line shit at modelling and had to politely refuse the multitude of crappy models I sent them. The good thing is this got me practicing, and I did get a hell of a lot better over the course of several tens of rejected model packs. I think they flat out stopped looking at them eventually, even though the last few sets were easily better than what they had in game.
There were a few people I played with in wurm that were interested in making games as well, and anyone who showed a speck of skill would have oceans of noobs such as myself swarming around offering to help, in the hopes their work would be played by people. Evidently (and stupidly) I was the best modeller in the community, purely because I spent far too long on every model I made, and I ended up helping a bloke called garrettwademan make a wurm-online-done-right-with-other-shit-thrown-in game (because what better premise to start a game with a bunch of noobs than to improve on what experienced game developers already produced?). That game was
Isle of Polm (that website literally hasn't changed since 2007). Old mate Garrettwademan could code, I'll give him that. But he was about as productive as a drunk hobo with nowhere to go. He also had a massively over inflated sense of his own abilities and a level of cluelessness in design that bordered on deliberate ignorance. I mean look at the title. How do you even pronounce that? I clashed a lot as his decisions went from "uh... ok I guess" to "WHATTHEFUCKAREYOUDOINGYOUARERUININGPOTATODAY!!!1". For instance we tested
torque for a little while, which had a great workflow, a great map editor and a pretty good scripting base, but not much network support, and I loved the shit out of it. I was set on using it to make our game, since we had started in 3d game maker studio, which is undoubtedly the worst engine ever made and was already several years past its ungraceful demise. In order to get a model into the game I had to pirate 3dsmax, export an obj from blender, import it into max and export it as something else, then run it through a converter that only worked 60% of the time. So I was pretty irate when GWM set in stone 3DGMS when Torque had out-of-the-box .obj support.
Long story short, I ended up ragequitting and took a break from serious modelling for a few years. I did stuff here and there and put a few
disgustingly bad models on turbosquid but nothing to push my skills. In any case my models were entirely sub par at this stage anyway so nothing of value was lost.
I started focusing on modelling again in about 2007 once I got out of basic training in the army (yeah I was in the army), making still images and wondering why my shit was, well, shit. I started studying this and that and eventually got a handle on it enough to be proud of what I was creating. Then Left4Dead was released and I played its guts out. I started playing a lot of community maps and eventually started offering to model for people. My first model to make it in source was an ammo bag that someone else compiled for me and got a lot of praise from the circles I frequented. I'll see if I can dig up a screen. I started to help with a few maps, none of which got released. There was a prison map that was released in block form without my models in it because the mapper disappeared, an outdoor map that I made some trees for that never got out of the gates and an underground map that I can't remember much about. I also found out later that I Hate Mountains actually had my very own truck trailer model in there. I was so happy. It was the first time that I had a model in a released mod, and I didn't even know about it. And it was a fucking good mod to boot.
I can't remember the names of most of the mods I worked on at this point because they would literally last one to two moths tops before everyone just disappeared as I churned out models. There was about four of them and all of them were going to be the greatest mod of all time. I don't remember it but apparently I put a couple of models into Sabotage just before it went fwump. I downloaded it after the post mortem and was happily surprised to see my models going to waste. Maybe I was the bad variable. Every mod I joined lasted a few months and then died. The last (and biggest) mod I worked on was Aura, which is a facepunch mod. It had a few good modellers and programmers and they were essentially copying an already existing garrys mod game mode so they had kind of a blueprint to work from. The team was pretty productive for the most part, but there were extended periods of downtime which really ground my gears. I don't mind when life gets in the way of modding but people would just disappear for months on end and I was continually asking "Is x still on the team?". I eventually got sick of it and let the team down. They were waiting for a model that I just plain couldn't make (a mushroom - I still have trouble figuring out how to do the underside with all the lines) and I just bailed.
After this I kept talking to the lead, and he had a lot of ideas. I'll emphasise
ideas. By this stage I was pretty confident in source and so he kept asking me to make models here and there, and I would help out where I could. There was an idea for a zombie escape game mode map which was pretty good and I made a few models for that but it eventually just stopped getting worked on so I stopped modelling for it. There was also an RTS style game mode that he was working on that he kept asking for models but I knew by this stage that old matey was incapable of getting to release so I was very reluctant. He recently just posted a screenshot of it on steam, a year later, so I guess he's still working on it.
Here's where I opened up ModelsForTheMasses.com. I actually got the idea off one of my steam friends (you know who you are), who had a page somewhere offering a similar service for maps. I was sick of waiting for other people to do work. For the past two years I felt like I was just spinning my wheels so I decided to do something for and by myself that I would have something to show for at the end of it. I also wanted to gauge how much people valued my models, since I was pretty sure I was pretty good, but not sure if that was my ego talking. I ended up pushing my skills far beyond where I thought they were, since if someone is paying for a model they want something damn good, and all the projects were either guns, characters or vehicles - the big three. I'm very happy that I made that decision because now I have a nice little portfolio and lots of contacts in lots of mods that are actually going places. Most of the people I modelled for asked me to commit to their team and I had to continually decline. I don't sign on to mods anymore because it seems I am the death knell for them. Besides, if I sign on you're going to stop paying me. Why would I do that?
Since opening M4M I have done precisely what I want to do for precisely as long as I want to do it. I don't sign on to mods anymore but I do help on them. I'll usually sweep in, design or build something that they need the most, and then jog on to the next project as soon as the mod team slows production - sometimes to the detriment of the team (sorry FragGyver). Some notables I have worked with now are Stroll (by our very own MB), Mist Of Stagnation (another local - Don), KZmod (Kreedz climbing), Source Media Arcade (Anarchy Arcade), I did a thing for PlanetPhillip and I am now doing some simple stuff for Double Action Boogaloo. I'm considering re-opening M4M but I'll do it when I feel like it, since I'm currently resting on my laurels.
So this turned out to be a more personal foray into what made me me than I had intended. I'll update with images later to counteract the wall of text.
EDIT: Now I think of it, not a single mod that I have officially become a team member of has ever released. You do NOT want me on your mod team.