November 5 2009
I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted a position at the Oscar-winning studio Animal Logic in Sydney, Australia. Knowing the quality of their work and the cool projects they work on, I am very proud and excited to be part of their incredibly talented team.
Being more of a summer-than-winter-guy, I am also happy to skip the harsh European winter this year and head straight back into a warm summer Down Under. Last Christmas I spent a couple of great weeks touring Australia and I cannot think of a better place to be.
Sunset near Mildura, Victoria
What this means…
For Studio Lampion
Not much, really. In fact my partners will continue to run the studio I helped build up without me. They are very supportive of my decision and I’m leaving on amicable terms.
For my plug-ins and shaders
I will probably have less time to spend working on them than I did in the past months. Expect updates and new releases from me to slow down.
For myself
Personally, I am super-happy to be moving to Australia along with my girl! Our visas have already been approved and flights are booked… nothing can stop us now :)
June 4 2009
It’s been more than two years since the last major revision to minning.de. To coincide with the upcoming release of a new version of Normality I thought it would be a good idea to finally push through with the new design that’s been cooking for almost ten months.
Wordpress remains my CMS of choice and I am very happy with the latest version. I was considering both Drupal and TYPOlight, but WP does everything I need and does it well.
My new design also makes heavy use of jQuery, which I am using to spruce up the site with some neat effects and also to significantly cut down on loading times through the use of AJAX; according to my tests, this iteration of minning.de is fastest I’ve ever developed, even though it is by far the most complex personal website I’ve worked on.
And thanks to web browser’s increased standards compliance developing this site was relatively painless and at times an actually enjoyable process. Firefox and Safari pretty much render the way one expects them to.
At this point I’d also like to send out a really big F***YOU to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
From the get go I decided not to make any effort whatsoever to support IE6. Little did I know that IE7 would require personal attention as well.
It’s almost like Microsoft is intentionally trying to screw web developers: They have accumulated nearly a handful incompatible versions that each require individual hacks and to top it off, you can’t install them at the same time to test your site – brilliant!
September 8 2007
At long last, I’ve found some time to post on my personal website again. Celulight and Floodgate have been finalized a long time ago, and so has a new version of Normality, with some amazing new features and much better integration of all its various effects.
I’ve also made a decision that will disappoint some readers and users of my software: The new versions of my After Effects plug-ins will not be released publicly. I have a variety of reasons for this decision; one being that my previous experiences with selling plug-ins for After Effects did not amount to anything that would have made the chores that go along with it worthwhile. At the same time, I put so much work and effort into the software that not using them would be not only a shame, but also foolish.
However, the main reason the plug-ins are not available to the public is that I spent the better part of this rainy summer preparing for the opening of our own animation shop, Studio Lampion. I believe that my software will benefit our work, pipeline and clients in more ways than one and giving this advantage out of our hands can’t be a clever move.
So there it is: I’m finally opening my own animation studio! Certainly a dream come true and something I’ve been thinking of for a very long time.
Studio Lampion is an animation studio in the heart of Berlin, Germany, founded by my good friend Matthias Koenig and myself. In the long term, we’ll be focusing our attention on non-photorealistic animation for film and TV, but for starters we’ll be bidding on anything we feel capable of producing. So if there’s anything you need done animation-wise… drop me a line!
December 25 2006
So I finally gave in and switched to Mac. After about 15 years on Windows (and the occasional encounter with the Penguins), I got myself an iMac, mainly because it’s nice, portable and supposedly artist friendly. Also, I’m not happy with the direction Microsoft is heading with Windows Vista. Don’t even get me started on all the Windows annoyances and “security”.
But I do question whether I made the right choice.
Now don’t get me wrong: I love this machine. It’s probably the most solid computer I’ve ever used. As they say, “it just works”. The only problem is: I don’t.
The utter lack of graphics software such as Photoshop, After Effects (and various plug-ins) and Maya in versions that actually run at half-decent speeds on this Intel machine is absolutely ridiculous. And that on a system that supposedly caters to artist’s needs? Pah!
Needless to say, installing Boot Camp was the first thing I did after realizing the dearth of graphics software on OS X Intel, since switching applications doesn’t make any sense for the sole benefit of running them in the oh so pretty Mac OS.
My solution for now: OS X has reduced itself to a fancy system for web-browsing and neat drop shadows. It’s gray Windows for everything else…
Just sad.
July 30 2006
Although I don’t think of myself as a web designer and I hate debugging HTML with a passion, some people seem to enjoy my current site design.
Scanning through my logs, I found these CSS galleries had recently included minning.de and have been sending a huge number of new visitors here:
CSS Remix
tom.ma
The Daily Slurp
CSS Mania
I’ll also note that a few unnamed folks appear to enjoy my design so much that they’ve taken the liberty to outright steal my files and simply replace the copyright notice. Some even found it unnecessary to host the graphics themselves, simply pointing to my server for the juicy color-splash.
Very clever.
Next time try to do it in a way so you don’t appear prominently in my log-files, my Eastern-European friends…
June 3 2006
Again, it’s been a long time since my last update!
Most of it was spent in San Diego, where I interned as a Shader/Lighter/Renderer for Pendulum. It was very cool over there and I sure learned a lot — and the results are pretty stunning as well, though unfortunately I can’t present them yet.
Yesterday I released my newest plug-in for After Effects, Reality. This one was a lot more work than last time, mainly because it is a whole set of plug-ins opposed to only one in Normality.
Reality deals with advanced lighting effects that are normally impossible to achieve in AE:
– specular highlights
– image based illumination (IBI)
– bump/normal mapping
– reflections
– refractions
These are especially useful as they work in near real-time, so there’s no more need to wait for Maya/MentalRay/RenderMan/etc. to finally finish rendering.
I also have a new short film in mind and have a pretty good idea of how I’ll incorporate Normality and Reality into my workflow. Nothing’s been decided story-wise, but it sure looks like there be pirates afoot…
