About

Life, the Uni­verse and Everything

Pic related: It's me.

Pic related: It’s me.

Hello and wel­come to the online port­fo­lio of Ste­fan Min­ning. I’m a dig­i­tal artist and soft­ware devel­oper work­ing for Ani­mal Logic in Syd­ney, Australia.

At minning.de I present my com­puter graph­ics art­work as well as my research and devel­op­ment in com­puter graph­ics tech­nol­ogy, some of which I make avail­able for free to hope­fully ben­e­fit the CG community.

So… what do I do?

My pas­sion is ani­ma­tion, though oddly enough I’m not par­tic­u­larly good at that… instead, I work in the back­ground paint­ing tex­tures and mattes, per­form­ing shad­ing, light­ing and com­posit­ing of 2D and 3D scenes and occa­sion­ally adding spe­cial effects here and there. Because I am a bit impa­tient with slow and inef­fi­cient graph­ics soft­ware, I also like to develop tools and tech­niques to make these com­plex processes eas­ier, more fun and quicker to boot!
Other inter­ests include pho­tog­ra­phy, typog­ra­phy and web design. This web­site is an exam­ple of me dab­bling in all of these areas.

My main inter­est as an artist and devel­oper lies in the seem­ingly awfully broad field of non-​​photorealistic ren­der­ing, such as you’ve surely seen in Dis­ney films or Japan­ese anime.
Nowa­days pho­to­re­al­is­tic graph­ics are all the rage, so that’s what I do at work most of the time.

Skills, Tools and Developments

As I’m inter­ested in both the artis­tic as well as the tech­ni­cal aspects of graph­ics pro­duc­tion, my dig­i­tal tool­box includes Maya, Ren­der­Man, men­tal ray, Pho­to­shop, After Effects and Nuke. I also code in a vari­ety of lan­guages, such as the Ren­der­Man shad­ing lan­guage, PHP, C/​C++, Del­phi and Python.
Note­wor­thy devel­op­ments include the inter­ac­tive relight­ing solu­tion Nor­mal­ity, the auto­mated cel shad­ing tool Celu­light and my ever-​​growing col­lec­tion of shaders rang­ing from full-​​featured toon-​​shading solu­tions for Ren­der­Man and men­tal ray to sim­ple one-​​off util­i­ties and shaders for phys­i­cally accu­rate, pho­to­re­al­is­tic rendering.

In 2007 I decided to make my After Effects plug-​​in Nor­mal­ity free for com­mer­cial and non-​​commercial use. After being fea­tured in tuto­ri­als by Video Copi­lot the plug-in’s pop­u­lar­ity really took off and it is cur­rently being used in many cool pro­duc­tions in stu­dios around the world.
I am also involved in open source projects and have released my tone map­ping plug-​​in Atlas under the free GPL license.

Where in the world…?

My where­abouts change rather fre­quently… so far I’ve lived and worked in India, Ethiopia, Japan, Ger­many, the United States and Aus­tralia.
Today I live in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, where I work as a Look Devel­op­ment TD for Ani­mal Logic.

Pho­tog­ra­phy

I am also an avid pho­tog­ra­pher and love to travel with my cam­era. In fact, I rarely leave the house with­out it!