Home | Profile | Curriculum Vitae | About Me

These pages are here to give you some background information on me and my work. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to contact me!

Background

I have almost 10 years of total experience, 6 years professional, in Newtek's Lightwave 3D and other graphics programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, Macromedia Freehand and Flash, or Pixologic ZBrush. I've worked in different production environments, at home or on site at my client's offices. I greatly enjoy working in a team and am always looking for new opportunities to work together with other artists, not only because you always learn from one another, but also because its plain more fun than working alone.

I've always loved the process of creating something new from scratch, so my strengths are in modeling and texturing of both organic and hard surface objects. But I also have experience in rigging, regular and character animation, lighting and shading, visual effects, dynamics and compositing.

Getting into Graphics

I've been using computers to create graphics since an early age, but really got into it towards the end of school. About a year before graduating, I invested a chunk of my savings into a new PC and Newtek's Lightwave 3D. I picked it up fast, turning out my first models and animations within days.

I became an active part of the online community, was one of the founding members of the Babylon 5 Modeler's Guild, contributor to Sci-Fi Art and a featured guest artist of the Wolfpack (probably one of the finest 3D groups at their time). Even though I don't update it anymore, I still maintain my old site, where you can download artwork and some of the models I released over the years, several still widely used in fan-art today.

I started doing web development during my obligatory year of civil service. After that I got the opportunity to have a paid internship at S+P Industrial, where I stayed for almost a year and worked in a wide variety of design-related areas. The time really broadened my horizons concerning all the different aspects of graphics design.

I considered studying graphic design, but I wanted to focus more on CG. There wasn't much in ways of affordable education of that kind available in Germany at the time, only expensive private academies offered CG courses and I had no family that could support me financially. Most they taught was how to use software anyway, something that, as I got commended on during my time at S+P, I've always been able to teach myself very quickly. Instead I decided to try my luck as a freelance artist.

Freelancing

I started out doing small graphics and website jobs, one of the most challenging projects was creating an entire CI (corporate identity) for a client (website not maintained by me anymore).

In 2000 I got into contact with Gigaperls, a small developer producing, among other things, PC games for kids. They were in negotiations for creating a game based on a well known license and were interested in going for a stylized 3D look. I hadn't yet created many characters in 3D, but I accepted the challenge and together we produced prototype 3D graphics for a presentation. The presentation was very well recieved and pre-production of the game could begin. I'd end up working on this and other projects with Gigaperls till late 2003. After a vacation, we started production on an as of yet unannounced game in early 2004, using the realtime 3D engine from Jim Knopf. Unfortunatelly the project is currently on halt.

I'm currently paying the bills by doing small design related projects, but would really love to get down and dirty with something bigger again in the near future. The experience of working on something in a team is something I miss.