There are not too many fancy things happening in my life at the moment. The work at Ambient is quite interesting and yet a little bit disenchanting from time to time. First of all because I have to admit how little I know about Maya. This program opens up a hell lot of possibilities! On the other hand it’s kind of wired to feel like you’re building up your future career on a single program… Second it is becoming obvious to me how difficult it is to produce a 3d animation feature film in Germany. Compared to America, Australia or New Zeeland the industry over here still seems to be in its infancy which of course is mostly a matter of size. In other words: Ambient does not employ a few hundred 3d artists like Pixar does – but the ticket price at your local cinema is the same for movies from both companies. Assuming that the German average consumer goes to the movies 1.5 times a year you can clearly tell what the problem is.

Apropos cinema and Pixar: I did what Woody, the cowboy from Toy Story, recommends in this awesome trailer:

I met WALL•E who finally arrived in German theatres on September 25^th. Kind of a good idea because this movie kicks ass! Although Ratatouille stays my favourite movie from Pixar, I highly recommend watching this masterpiece (definitely to everybody, not only to my fellow 3d animation students!) The only thing that bothers me a little bit is the implementation of live action characters during a few video messages on the human space ship. It’s not like it’s ruining the movie in any way but I just don’t understand the reason and from my point of view it simply does not fit in.

During the next few days I’m going to finish my report on the semester abroad in Sydney that I have to write for the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). That’s the support organisation that payed my scholarship. If I’m confident with the result I might upload it to this site (in German language). While writing this report I really feel like my German vocabulary and writing skills have degenerated rapidly in the past few years. Or maybe I’m just getting older. At least I am not 20 anymore, am I? ;)

Fortunately I found this nice website (German language)…

… so here is some news!

Hi everybody. I didn’t write too much since I’m back in Germany. I know. At least I managed to upload a gallery about ‘States of Convergence’ to my internet portfolio, as you can see on the sidebar.

Well, to be honest I was pretty lazy and was having a good time with friends, enjoying my holidays until my internship starts on September 1rst. This internship will last six months and will take place at Ambient Entertainment, a 3d animation studio from Hanover that is currently working on its 4th feature film. I’m not sure if I am allowed to talk about the project that I am going to be working on there… so to shrink responsibility I’ll simply provide you with this link to a blog entry of one of Ambient’s art department guys. ;)

In my opinion this seems to be a great project and I’m really looking forward to be a part of it. Now I am a little bit busy with moving to Hanover…

Well, and since 3d animation is quite addictive, I was not able to stay away from Maya for too long. So I modelled these two objects, which are intended to appear as background objects in the latest project of my fellow students Dennis and Patrick from FH Hannover (University of Applied Science and Arts, Hanover).

Smooth surfaces on both objects are simply achieved by changing the angle of the normals to 180° to save render time instead of using polygon smooth. So they’re both basically ‘low poly objects’. You clearly can see this on the slightly edgy wheels or the saddle but as I said: they’re not created for close ups.

Oh… and the bicycle is completely ‘riggable’, which I might take care of for my next demo reel. ;)

Finally I’d like to show you some interesting stuff that I found on the internet.

This is a project from Hyungkoo Lee, a South Korean artist who analysed the anatomic structure of famous cartoon characters like Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny and so on and created skeletons which seem to be believable from a biomechanical point of view. Here is the official German website about his exhibition at the ‘Naturhistorisches Museum Basel’. Since there were several seminars dealing with biomechanics in the multimedia class at FH Hannover during the past two semesters, this might be of particular interest for my fellow students. ;)

Cheers