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!

Phew, this is becoming kind of an exhausting week! Although… currently I’m doing what I’m best at: creating digital garbage! ;)
Ok seriously: There will be a presentation of a few shots of Ambient’s current project ‘Animals United’ (German: ‘Konferenz der Tiere’) based on a short novel by the famous German author Erich Kästner at the ‘American Film Market’ in November. Last Friday I was told that in one of those shots there’s a garbage can. This garbage can is not intended to contain any beverage packagings. Unfortunately until last friday this garbage can was filled with nothing else but beverage cans, beverage bottles and beverage boxes. So my supervisor and I had to model a whole bunch of garbage items which I also have to texture now. All within a week. Actually this is a nice opportunity for me to get a little into texturing and away from all the tree trunks and branches I’ve been modelling before.

I also managed to complete the report on my semester abroad at UTS which I mentioned in my last entry. It’s just a short and sketchy summary and it’s mainly written for future exchange students of the German Academic Exchange Service. You can download it here in German Language if you’re interested in reading it.

I’ve uploaded a lowres version of ‘States of Convergence’. Click here to download it.

A whole website with a lot more background information is currently under way.

Heyho! As promised here is some news for you!

We finished our project with the Master of Digital Architecture and Master of Animation students.

The final product is a sequence called ‘States of Convergence’ and is supposed to give the viewer an impression of the futuristic Sydney in the year 2050. It was created for a presentation of the Vector Guerrillas at the Critical Visions conference of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects that took place last week. It is the biggest national architecture conference in Australia. I will upload the videofile as soon as possible.

Our timeframe was limited to six weeks and from that two weeks passed by due to research work and mainly due to the fact that we had to wait for the Panasonic hd cam and the Boujou 3d tracking software - although the responsible persons did a great job in getting us the necessary equipment as soon as possible, or even sooner. ;)

Our task was to implement buildings and objects, that were designed by the architects, into life footage, that we shot on four different places in Sydney. For one shot we went onto the very topside of the UTS tower where we were actually not allowed to stay longer than ten minutes because of the heavy radiation. But the view was awesome!
It’s only approxamately a 160° view but if you like this panorama click here for the highres version.

Of course the 3d buildings that we received from the architecturs were great for their purposes - which mainly means to present 3d objects on 2d platforms. But as we wanted to show them from different distances and directions, we had to cleanup or remodel them, shade, light and render them and composite them into the life footage.
Fortunatly Bernd made clear very early what kind of goal we had to achieve.

Personally I was responsible for remodelling parts the tower building, the simulation of the hair system that is supposed to collect energy in this futuristic vision and some background animations. If you look closely at the fourth shot, you will notice some tiny little people that are running around on the ground. Actually I created a simple humanoid model with main extremities and animated a complete walk cycle… just to find out that you almost see nothing but black dots in the final version.

The last days before the presentation were really work packed. We actually spent several nights at uni and fought with the renderfarm from time to time. Once we ended up rendering on 32 computers… locally.

But the worst thing is: McDonald’s was only 50m away and therefore even closer to our building than the ‘Union Center’ which is more or less the UTS’ equivalent to the ‘Mensa’ at German universities - just more expensive.

Oh and before I forget to mention it: Anthony Burke, who led this project, told us, that he is going to show the sequence during his guest lecture at Princeton University. :)

Now we have two weeks off (as I am writing this, there are only ten days left) but I think I’ll have to use most of the time for my assignments for Game Design and 3d Animation.

Ahoi. It just came to my mind that I left Germany about one month ago. Time seems to pass by so quickly by now.

Since my last post I had to spend a lot of time in the computer labs at UTS. Although it’s quite comfortable I had to get used to the damn well functioning air conditioning. I think it’s less cold in Germany at the moment than in those labs!

But of course I also explored some new places in Sydney like Manly for example where I went to meet Anna, a former fellow student of mine from high school in Germany. To get there I had to take a ferry - which was great - and to get to the ferry I had to go to the Opera House - which was also great. I think in reality it even looks better than on photos. Anyway, to get to the Opera House I crossed the Botanic Garden which is absolutely beautiful – but guess what? I forgot to take the memory card of my camera with me. I was told that hundreds of those huge fruit bats, that you can see flying around in the evening very often, are resting there during the day. Sadly I didn’t see any of them. So next time when I visit the Botanic Garden I will take my Memory Card with me and search for some bats.

Furthermore I found out that Australia might not beat Germany in the field of bureaucracy in general but in some areas they are not to be underestimated…

This story originally started in Germany. During our studies at our home university my fellow exchange students and I already specialized quite a lot in 3d animation. That’s why all of us wanted to enrol in subjects like ‘Advanced 3D Animation” from the course Master of Animation for example.

To do so we had to send so called e-requests to the UTS Student Centre, what we already did from Germany. Answer to all of us except Bernd who already has his pre-diploma:

‘Undergraduate students are not allowed to do Postgraduate subjects.’

But as all of our Australian professors and lecturers where fine with the idea of letting us participate in those subjects when we arrived in Sydney, we thought it would be easy to go to the responsible office and ask them again to enrol us. At least it only needed to be accepted from the official site. Unfortunately we had to find out that e-requests are the only way to substitute subjects. So we sent new e-requests, mentioning that our request was approved by the responsible course directors. After one week we got a reply saying that our request was forwarded to IT for their approval. Great! (At least they finally managed to press the forward button!) One day later we got our reply from IT saying that due to the fact that we are undergraduate students we would not meet the pre-requirements because we were not postgraduate students.

So Michael, the professor for the Master of Animation course recommended taking some printed emails from the responsible course directors and the international office to the guys from the student centre and sorting it out with them face to face. Guess what they told us there!? ‘Send and e-request and attach those emails!’ There should be no more trouble then and they would wave us through.

I think it’s not necessary to mention that our requests got rejected because we are undergraduate students…!?

The most interesting thing is: The undergraduate subjects we are enrolled in now are taking place at the same time in the same room and are led by the same lecturers as the subjects for the master students. The only difference in my case is that they’ll be listed as ‘3D Animation’ instead of ‘Advanced 3D Animation’ and ‘Introduction to Game Design’ instead of ‘Game Design’ on my final certification. Weird, isn’t it?

But I also experienced an opposite situation. For an interdisciplinary course project we needed to do some camera tracking. Until today UTS owns no tracking software and Mini DV cameras only which are impossible to use for clean tracking. Although Visual Communications is going to acquire ten HDV cameras soon we won’t be able to use them because they will need them for their own purposes. So they ordered the tracking program Boujou and the related Maya plugin Moujou within two days and a Panasonic HD camera within a single week! That is brisk!

Btw.: I’m sorry but the ‘more’ tag doesn’t work properly due to my little knowledge in all this html, css and php stuff. This is why this post apears to be very long. Unfortunatly it seems like I won’t have enough time to fix this during the next few weeks.

Cheers!

Heyho! I didn’t write anything for a few days mostly due to our bad internet connection or just because I was busy. We finished working on the mocap project… as long as we don’t get a call from Germany to go back to the UTS dungeon and shoot some scenes again during the next weeks. ;)
I did also wear the mocap suite for some shots and although it looks absolutely stupid and it’s quite warm inside it is still a lot of fun.
This picture shows me in front of the Viscon Interface that we projected against the studio wall. So the red-green-blue colored guy on left is basically the digital version of me.

On Wednesday we first visited a barbeque for new UTS students where we met some American and Australian students. Afterwards we moved altogether to a pub where we participated in a trivia game. I think we placed fourth or something.
On Thursday there was a cocktail party for international students at UTS where you could get everything from beer to champagne – except cocktails. Anyway… champagne for students… what comes next? Maybe the cafeteria will sell caviar?!

Friday I saw Bondi Beach at night for the first time. Besides all the bars and pubs there’s also something like a public place where people meet to have barbeque and a few drinks. You just need to bring it yourself. Jimbeam-Coke in hand, feet in the pacific, slight guitar music in the background – I think you get the point of it. ;)

Yesterday we visited Tamarama Beach which is like a little sandpit between some cliffs.

Courses will start today. It looks like we will be allowed to enrol in the master subjects that I mentioned before. We will also be involved in an architecture project that is targeted on the realization of a futuristic vision of Sydney. Can’t wait! ;)

Oh… apropos UTS stuff… Did you know that the UTS tower was voted ‘Ugliest Building of Sydney’? I really don’t know how this happened… ;)

… more or less. But as long as you stay in an IMAX 3d cinema you definitely have the feeling you were part of the movie. Yesterday we visited Sydney’s IMAX and I can tell you… it’s really amazing. Although the movie sucks in terms of adapting the original Beowulf saga, the IMAX experience really makes it a must see. And if you look at the camera angles and movement you can clearly see that this movie was made for 3d cinema.

So yeah… here’s a little photo of Manuel and me to prove that we were there. I bet these funny glasses will become absolutely hip during next summer! ;)

Before we had the opportunity to watch this 272-mocap-camera-based piece of pure hardware consumption we had to face the problems that come with an eight camera system like the one UTS owns. Although it was very interesting and sometimes a lot of fun we had to accept that an eight camera system is not almighty. There were still some gaps in your motion capturing data when less than three cameras were able to see one of the markers at the same time. Monday we will meet again at UTS to continue working on this project. I am really looking forward to this.

Between gathering mocap data and watching a mocap data based movie we went through China Town to Darling Habour. So I got to see some new interesting places in Sydney. Here are some photos:

Today I was at UTS again and met some university lecturers including my german and my future australian animation professors. We talked about some subjects that my fellow exchange students and I would like to participate in and maybe there is a little chance to visit an advanced computer animation subject and a game design subject from the master of animation course. That would obviously be absolutly awsome but I know that uni politics can be very obstructive… Some of you should know what I mean. ;)

Anyway, we also visited the computer labs. Macs everywhere… a little bit scary. I suggested that they should rename the uni into iUTS. It still looked very impressive and comfortable at the same time… there are sofas and small chillout corners and of course… air conditioning. Maybe I’ll need a jacked during the animation subjects.

We also visited the motioncapturing facility where we will start working on an interesting short film project with our german university lectuters tomorrow. It is a vicon (I first understoon ‘wacom’ what I found a little bit irritating) system with eight cameras so it really seems to be quite mighty and I’m really looking forward to checking it out.

Finally I would like to provide you with a little snapshot that I took when I left my current housing this afternoon.

So this is what you see, when you leave the building where I currently dwell. You maybe won’t see it in this picture that well but Sydney absolutely reminds me of GTA Vice City…