Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing made it onto the vimeo front page and is now featured in the Vimeo HD Channel (15,288 suscribers). Within three days our views increased by 7300!

Here is some proof that this actually happened. ;)

This Tuesday the new corporate website of 5 PRIME was launched. Why do I tell you that? Because I did the graphic design for this website and created a short animation intro that welcomes you as you enter the website. Tons of credit goes to Felix who I believe must have been planning and hacking code together till his fingers bled and his brain started twisting especially during the last few weeks. :)

Personally I found it quite challenging to meet all the requirements (where to place all the different kinds of content) and still to deliver a usable and legible design, but it all worked out pretty well I think. Furthermore I learned a lot about visual conception, usability, and typography & web layout during this project.

So feel free to click HERE and visit the relaunched 5 PRIME website. Any comment or critic on the web design and the intro animation is of course appreciated. I’ll probably add a few making off pictures from the intro animation to my portfolio in the near future. As you can tell, I’m quite lazy regarding constant updates of my own website. To be honest the animation, which is showing a cute little frog trying to climb on top of a 5 PRIME box to reach another box fitting his small size, was already created about a year ago as an assignment at UTS (where it received a mark of 98%).

Anyway… as I’m talking about jobs and projects right now I may as well polish the image of my current job at Ambient Entertainment as one of my last posts on this topic seemed to be almost depressive (at least from my current perspective).

Actually I was given some very nice tasks since that last post about my work on ‘Animals United’ (which is now almost a year old). After the end of my internship I was offered a contract for a 20hours/week job so I could work alongside my studies at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hanover. Although this did leave almost no spare time at all for me, it was (to my surprise) actually doable. Of course all the movie content is still top secret but I can tell you that I got the opportunity to work on some really gorgeous sets and environments like the home burrow of one of the main characters. It’s sad that for obvious reasons I’m not allowed to give away any further details.

To withdraw the last remaining minutes from my spare time I also worked as a ‘Hiwi’ (student assistant) at uni during the last semester teaching other students character modelling and sculpting using Maya and Mudbox. It’s amazing how much you learn when you teach others. ;)

As you can probably guess some projects for uni did therefore suffer under all the different workloads. This is why I am still busy finishing some projects from the last semester… like the crab thing for example. I don’t want to give away too much right now but it involved the setup of a character rig far more complex than any rig I’ve ever created before. The good thing is: I can do MEL scripting now.

The bad thing is: I see funny little crabs everywhere. No, just kidding. ;)

Here is a screenshot showing the self written user interface on the right side:

I just rendered a quick playblast showing parts of a dynamic walk cycle.

Take a look!

If you think I’m spending too much time producing crap crab - you’re totally right!

More info on this slightly grumpy little fellow and his lot coming soon (hopefully)!

… 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

Who would have expected a student film from the second semester to reach the top ten at a competition that includes short films from BUF (sfx for Spiderman, Batman, Matrix, Harry Potter etc.) or h5 (comercials for Audi, VW, Citroen…) and top European film schools?

Catwalk placed 8th out of 24 nominated films and I think we can be pretty confident with the result. Thanks to everybody who voted for Catwalk! :)

‘Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing’ won the Digital Pike award at the first annual of the e Clips festival.

Thanks to Dennis for the photo!

Today I got an email from my fellow student Patrick Kayser saying that our short film ‘Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing’ from the second semester won the second price (endowned with 500€) at the Movies & Stills Award in the category Stills.

Therefore the priced stills will be part of an exhibition at basis in Frankfurt and a presentation in Rödermark.

Catwalk is currently also nominated for the Bitfilm Award 2008 in the category 3D Space. Due to the fact, that the winner is selected through a public vote, we would appreciate any support we can get. So if you have not voted yet, please follow this link! ;)

A highres version of Catwalk can be downloaded here. I’ll upload it to my webspace as soon as I have faster internet access again.

Hey everybody, this is very important!

Since the 1rst of May there is a vote running on the website of the Bitfilm Festival that lists all nominated movies for the Bitfilm Award 2008. Please do me the favour and hop over to the website and submit your vote.

You can do this by creating an account, logging in and going to the 3D SPACE AWRARD section.

To create an account, please click -> here <-.

If you search for the direct link to Catwalk, please click -> here <-.

Thank you very much!

Btw. the timing of the background music in the Bitfilm version of Catwalk is a little bit messed up due to some technical issues. I hope you still like the movie. ;)

Finally the date of the e Clips film festival got officially announced on the website of the University of Applied Science and Arts, Hanover. Click here for further information.

I’m very sure that this is going to be a fantastic event and I’m quite sad not to be able to attend it. Anyways I hope that one of the two entries that I worked on (e Clips Trailer and Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing) are going to win a digital pike award. ;)

I highly recommend to everybody who is around one of the two venues to drop over and to have a very entertaining night packed with great short films for less money than a cinema ticket would normally cost!

I just received the info that Catwalk - Black Cat Crossing got nominated for the Bitfilm Award in the category 3D Space!

More news are coming soon but for now I have to drink some beer after a few very busy days.