Dimension dESIGN Animation Group was born some time in 1991. In the beginning it was just a couple of friends all falling in love for the new technology - computers and that special part of them - Digital Content Creation. Back then it was called simply Computer Graphics.
It all begun at school of course - when we stayed after classes, just because there were some "cool" PC/XT machines which we could use. We played games and thought of making one some day. We watched movies and carefully followed every SFX detail, hoping to get our hands on something like that... That formed us.
In chronological order the team was formed by me - Stanislav Evstatiev and Nikolai Spassov. We started work for a small high-tech company mainly doing computer graphics (something that was real high-tech in the era of 386). Soon we realized that it is hard to make great CGI on PCs and we moved forward - a year later the team had another member, Plamen Marinov, and we started working on the first SGI Crimson machine in Bulgaria (and probably in Eastern Europe). In the studio we had a Pioneer Laser Recording device and an AMPEX Betacam SP as side hardware. The real challenge was that because all the linking and studio set-up costed a heavy bunch of money the process of stiching all these in fully working enviroment was up to us. We did it, and also we did much more out of it. Unfortunately the market collapsed and brought the company that hired us to bankrupt. We held as long as we could, but the need for money made us split. Nikolai Spassov and Plamen Marinov went to another Bulgarian city on the sea - Bourgas and started working in the biggest local cable TV - RentTV. Stanislav took his part of the obligatory military service. Meanwhile he managed along with Nikolai's brother to make the openings of the newborn Varna cable TV - "Mustang" which later transformed into one of the largest Bulgarian cable stations - M-SAT. M-SAT is where Nikolai Spassov and Plamen Marinov continued to work from 1997 till 2003.
Meanwhile obsessed by ideas of unreachable heights Stanislav Evstatiev asked Ivan Kolev to take the risk and try to code the impossible - a small hair demo, running for DOS. They knew each other back from the Math school and had already done in their free time together with Hristo Bojinov the first adventure game in Bulgaria. It was small, it was free. It was a try. But in our eyes it was a great success!
So he took the challenge and in few months had a working technology demo for ultra fast hair generation and rendering. While looking for a 3D platform we decided that the 3D Studio architecture is the most open and easy to work with and it will be the best to use. Then following the wise advice of Stefan Didak from Animagic Stanislav contacted Digimation for support and we stepped on the road of 3ds max plug-in development.
In 1997 Stanislav Evstatiev and Ivan Kolev made "Dimension dESIGN AG" an official company. This is the year we released Shag:FUR exclusively through DIGIMATION. We keep working whenever we can with Nikolai Spassov and Plamen Marinov.
Two years of hard research on dynamics and shading resulted in the release of Shag:HAIR in the end of 1999.
In 2000 and until today our prime target is to polish the HAIR tools and to support all the 3ds max community that use Shag range of products around the world. We have made a numerous improvements and touch-ups to Shag:HAIR and we supported all the later releases of 3ds max up to 5.x. We think Shag:Hair 1.16 says it all.
At the begining of 2003 Plamen Marinov moved to METRO Group - TV show producers.
Dimension dESIGN is working in collaboration with Peter Mitev and Vladimir Koylazov - CHAOS Group, Miroslava Arnaudova - Light Delight.me and ZOOM Studio.
From 2001 to 2004 we were focussed on mobile entertainment - You can visit Garga Games to learn more.
