October 9 2005

Graduation!

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On Thurs­day it was my turn to give a pre­sen­ta­tion on my 2.5 NPR ren­derer Panda infront of the board of exam­in­ers at my uni­ver­sity. Appar­ently they enjoyed my speech as well as the slideshow and ren­dered sam­ples I had pre­pared, gain­ing me the best pos­si­ble grade! Quite a relief I must say. So that means I’m finally done with uni­ver­sity and need to find my way into the CG industry.

But first I’ll be off to China for a few weeks, so there might be a lack of updates to this site. It’s my first travel abroad in years and I do hope to enjoy the time! Other than that, I’ll also be on the look­out for job oppor­tu­ni­ties, you never know who you’ll meet at the airport…

My new demo reel still needs a lit­tle work, but I hope to post it online together with some sam­ples from my ren­derer before hop­ping on the plane next week.

September 26 2005

Welcome to Minning.de V4

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Well, it’s been a long time with­out updates! But I wasn’t idle all this time; for one, it’s just another week until I’ll finally receive my diploma in Media Design. My desser­ta­tion on non­pho­to­re­al­is­tic ren­der­ing was handed in two weeks ago, which left me a lit­tle time to update Minning.de’s design and con­tent.
This is a rather large leap in terms of design and func­tion­al­ity and I hope that every­thing works fine now. Some areas are still a lit­tle rough, but that’ll be fixed soon… I just wanted to get the update out before any­thing gets in the way again.
The whole site is based on a highly cus­tomized ver­sion of Word­Press, unlike my pre­vi­ous site, which incor­po­rated Word­press only in the Pro­duc­tion Log. I’m not some kind of XHTML/​CSS-​​zealot and, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less if my code val­i­dates or if every­thing is done the “right” way. For me all that counts is that it just works. So the site’s been tested up and down in var­i­ous browsers, but bear with me if I missed a bug or two along the way — should you encouter any­thing weird on your visit, please let me know!

As men­tioned above, my desser­ta­tion on non­pho­to­re­al­is­tic ren­der­ing is com­pleted. If all goes well I’ll post some sam­ples of what my ren­derer Panda is capa­ble of. Let me just say that Panda is suited for a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent styles and the result­ing look is very painterly.

So now that I’m more or less fin­ished with my stud­ies, I’m look­ing for a job in the CG indus­try. Con­tact me if you’re interested!

April 6 2005

Changes

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First of all: Yes, I’m still alive!

Over the past cou­ple of weeks there’ve been quite a few changes, many of which have kept me from post­ing updates on my Pro­duc­tion Log.

  • Let me begin by point­ing out the obvi­ous: minning.de has had a com­plete makeover. The new style looks fresher and more orig­i­nal than the last design. Some pages aren’t 100% done yet, but that shouldn’t stop me from switch­ing the lay­out now. The miss­ing con­tent and pages will be grad­u­ally updated in the com­ing days/​weeks.
  • A more unfor­tu­nate update: I’ll be work­ing less on Sleep­ing Dragon in the fore­see­able future: The stroke-​​renderer I’m devel­op­ing will be the topic of my upcom­ing stu­dent the­sis. Mean­ing that cer­tain scenes must be com­pleted soon, mostly to show off the pretty images it pro­duces. Other than that, I’m too occu­pied with other work at the moment, because…
  • … I need to pro­duce another short film! Uni is giv­ing us 8 weeks to cre­ate a film based on the ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing theme of “wait­ing”. Unfor­tu­nately there’s no way I could bend Sleep­ing Dragon to some­how be rel­e­vant to this theme, and 8 weeks aren’t enough time any­way. Now I have another cute story layed out and will post updates here, just like I’ve done for Sleep­ing Dragon.
March 8 2005

An other look

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From the very begin­ning it was my inten­tion to mimic the style of Disney’s clas­sics in Sleep­ing Dragon. It’s a style I absolutely adore and it suits the film’s story well. The whole screen­play is tai­lored towards this concept.

But… I’ve had time to think. And I’ve been work­ing on some soft­ware for my upcom­ing stu­dent the­sis, which makes me want to recon­sider the whole look of the film.
Of course I’m not going to throw every­thing I’ve done so far over­board, but this soft­ware pro­duces very inter­est­ing effects, to say the least. The style is unlike any­thing I’ve seen so far, and yet it’s still famil­iar enough to be inte­grated with what I already have.
I feel I’m really on to some­thing with this tech­nol­ogy! If I get the ren­der times down to an accept­able level there’s noth­ing to stop me from tak­ing this project in a whole dif­fer­ent direc­tion! It would be so great to have Sleep­ing Dragon stand out with a style of its own…

We shall see. Over the next two or three weeks I have time to work on the soft­ware, dur­ing which it will hope­fully get into a usable state. By then, if it still seems so mag­nif­i­cent and ground-​​breaking as it does after my lim­ited test­ing, I’ll post an update.

Hope­fully with some screens of what you can expect…

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