Portfolio: Light
Greeble City
As most of my work displayed here, I created Greeble City in Blender 3D. Even though it might appear complex, the modelling itself was quite simple. The city is one plane, displaced by a cell noise texture to create the buildings. I modelled a collection of details, like chimneys and antennas, and distributed them semi-randomly with a particle system. Semi-randomly because I tried 30 different seed values until I got a placement that I liked. Shading was mostly procedural as well, i.e. compressing noise textures in the z axis to create the windows. To achieve the grainy look I rendered the scene with a low sample count (you can see the amount of noise quite well in the clouds) and then composited using Render Layers like the Denoising Depth Variance.
Noisalizer
Driven by Audio Input
I had tried out quite a few differently approaches for creating a visualizer, but either it didn't feel quite right or my computer wasn't able to keep up. One thing to render one frame, another thing to render 90.000. Inspired by Aidy Burrows video "Nebulae Cloud Flythrough" I finally found a style that was working for me: One plane and one shader meant it was fast to render and for some reason combining procedural textures in all kinds of ways just makes me happy.
Drone Dancing at Färgfabriken, Stockholm
tech art exhibition about life in 2047
Drone Dancing was a Tech Art Exhibition my girlfriend Judy and me participated on. Supported by Goethe Institute, the Swedish Embassy in Berlin and CTM Festival, Drone Visions brought together a blend of people doing work in technology and arts. It really was a stunning experience and to be able to partake on this multiformat exhibition felt amazing. Judy and I built a 2.50 x 2.50m Cube envisioning how future technologies could affect our everyday life. On Pinterest you can find a collection of some of the inspiration that motivated us. Arriving in Stockholm with what we were able to bring by plane and only two days to setup was a challenge. In hindsight building the whole room in Germany would have enabled us to achieve more of what we had sketched out before. And even though it was quite stressful and I would approach it differently today, the exhibiton was a blast. With all the artists being really friendly, seeing the projects coming together was just awesome.
As part of the installation I created a generative ambient piece. Read about my sound for Drone Dancing here.
make_human
digital_void
Banner Explorations
for Tim & Struppel
In these three banners I aimed to translate the sound we play and love into visuals. It is the love for sounds that in their pureness could never exist, but have an 'analog' feel to them - something synthesized, precisely enriched by detail after detail, to create something that should almost exist through nature. And then it does.
In Digital Nature
This has been the Tim & Struppel Soundcloud banner for quite some time, although recently we decided to move to a 'real' analog style. For all the topology nerds out there - don't even ask. As in greeble city I started out with quite simple geometry and through experimentation with textures and lighting tried to achieve a reinterpretation of the form of stone and flowers.
Shand
Drones
Computer Vision
design to gather
BALU, Kellerperle
*Le rêve*** (1910) by Henri Rousseau**
Intimate
no name yet
Lost in Thoughts #7 for Tim & Struppel
Bubbles
Voulez-Vous, MS Zufriedenheit
For our first event at MS Zufriedenheit I wanted to do something special. The beautiful aesthetic of this club, combining a modern minimalist approach of glass, metal and cement with the warm simplicity of analog lightbulbs (the only source of lighting) has an appeal that is stylish, yet warm and welcoming. Even though the glass-facade and the quite simple geometry would have allowed quite simple modelling, I had wanted to try out Photogrammetry for quite some time and this was it. On a cloudy afternoon I took out the camera, removed some obstructing pieces from the scene and snapped a load of pictures. Back at home I sorted the out the best ones and loaded them into Agisoft PhotoScan. I had to help the Software quite a bit, tagging points manually in the different pictures. Here, I wished that I would have paid more attention to having details in frame which the software can track well. After the first calculation turned out a bit jagged, I ran another one with a smaller set of photos and combined the two models in Blender. So now the creative part started. After some playing around I decided to mirror the scan horizontally and vertically, emphasizing this with a centered camera. Turning to the characteristics of the club I downloaded some lightbulb models from blendswap and thus brought the inside of the club to the outside. Looking back I feel that leaving out the light-chains in front of the club would probably have created a deeper feel and underlined this idea. Then, I created a plane on top of the glass front, with a gloss layer for some nice reflections of the lights. Followed up by a quick particle system for some grass, and the ivy to bring in more organics and to break up the symetry. After that it was just some comping/postprocessing in Blender and Photoshop and the layout. We had about 100 posters and 1000 postcards printed with a text about the event on the back and distributed them throughout the city. This was a really fun project in which I learned a lot about how to prepare and work with photogrammetry.
Form Knospensprung, Club L
Knospensprung, Waldschänke Dornheim
Spielplatz, Club L
This Facebook banner I created for a club-night we hosted right around eastern. The egg was kinda obvious, but I wanted to break it up. And the shape and style was a nice extension of the Knospensprung design. Achieving consistency is great, even though it's always interesting to try out different approaches. Different designs pull different people! I picked orange this time because it worked really well with the black, the yolk and checked two important boxes for me: representing the sound played in a visual manner, and being warm and inviting.
Nautic
Can
Pasta
Danke, for my mother
Modelled some petals, created some stems and then spent a lot of time procedurally texturing. Even more for the Lettering.
Rocketry
I have been a great space fan for quite a few years, avidly following Spacex's work. This rocket nozzle was a simple exercise, the visible tubes (in bronze here) of Wernher von Braun's F-1 have a cool appeal to me, so I went with that. The nozzle itself was created from a curve spun around the z axis. The tubes from the same curve, this time beveled and arrayed in 1° steps. Bit unhappy how the 'chrome' turned out, and the black tube should taper a bit more for "pressure reasons", but at some point I moved on to a new project. I'll probably revisit this one in the future.
Sound, Space & Time
Tim & Struppel logo - Lucas Kassel
Flowering
This one is simple in concept, although I think the proportions turned out nicely. Sphere with a Displacement Modifier and a curve, converted mesh, with some modifiers on top to morph the geometry. Shading was one material for each object, with a noise texture distributing different shaders to each face. A few emitting particles around the object further deepen the rhythm of this piece and the fog just pulls it together.
For my Grandmother
Mars
resources:
Blender 2.7-2.8-git***.*** with a few addons
Photoshop & Illustrator for some of the comping and layout
MakeHuman Generator / ManuelbastionLAB 'intimate' 'make_human' 'for my grandmother'
painting** ***Le rêve*** (1910) - Henri Rousseau** _'balu' _
- Thank You!