Whats this all about?

In all the years that I was working and playing with 3D graphics I started a lot of projects, a lot of them never got finished and most of them were never published anywhere. Some made it into my portfolio but there is much more. I was looking for a way to publish some of my “other” work somewhere aside from my portfolio. Then I discovered blogs and realized that this is the perfect way to showcase all those personal projects, finished, in progress and unfinished.
So here it is, my bucket full of 3D project snippets. Enjoy, criticize and maybe even learn.

Bunker

Quite a while back I started working with a tool set called 3D Gamestudio by conitec. It is a game engine with tools to create your own game. The engine was capable of producing DirectX7 graphics. It came with a level editor that was much less comfortable than what I was used to from Lightwave but it created levels that you can actually walk through in real time (as you would expect from a game engine). I was fascinated by these new possibilities and started working on several projects. After a while I realized how much work it really is to produce a complete game, especially alone, so I went back to 3d stills and animations.
The pictures in this post are a level of a first person shooter inside a bunker somewhere in Germany during WWII. Looking at it today I think I must have been playing Medal of Honor a lot at that time and taken that as inspiration.
The geometry and lighting was created in the Game Studio Level Editor “WED”, the textures were made in Photoshop. I think the data for the level got lost over the years, what survived is a few screenshots. Click here to view them.

Formula Koenig

Formula Koenig is a trainee series for young race drivers founded in 1987. The featured vehicle is a 2003 car from the German series piloted by Frank Kechele. The vehicle is powered by a 100hp Volkswagen engine taken from the Volkswagen Polo.
During the 2003 season I worked as a web designer and 3D artist for several race drivers and teams during the week and as a photo journalist on the race weekends. This gave me the perfect opportunity to gather detailed information about the vehicle and offer visualizations for possible sponsors on a realistically (I hope) modeled virtual vehicle.

Creation date: February 2003
Software used: Lightwave, Photoshop

If I run out of projects or get really bored I might get back on this project to improve surfacing and lighting. For now I collected the current renderings in this gallery.

Constructive criticism is always welcome so post comments if you feel like it!

Birthday Invitation

This is an invitation I made to invite friends to my birthday party in 2002. It is made to look like a medieval note and is written in (kinda) medieval german.

Creation Date: July 2002
Software used: Lightwave 3D, Photoshop

1:24 Scale Remote Controlled Car

For a long time it was a passion of mine to have everything remote controlled: cars, planes, boats, even a diving submarine. The only thing I didnt have was a toy for playing inside when the weather was bad. Therefore I started using 3d to plan a 1:24 scale remote controlled car (~8 inches long). I don’t remember what brought the project to a screeching halt but I’m sure it ended with a grumpy “Oh this’ll never work anyway”

Creation Date: September 2001
Software used: Lightwave 3D

Museum

This image is the title image to one of my college projects. The task was to create a web gallery of some type. I created a 3 dimensional museum with my renderings as the exhibition. Within the rendered images of the museum were hotspots to navigate through the building or get a closeup of one of the exhibits. I will try to dig out some more images of the museum later.
This might have been one of the first projects under time pressure. Therefore it is not as high quality as it could be according to my skills at that time but it was still good enough to get very positive feedback from my teachers and co students.
The image is black and white on purpose. Since it served as the title image for the cd that I used to hand in my project and since I didn’t have a color printer I decided to render a black and white image.

Creation Date: May 1999
Software used: Lightwave 3D

Spirit of St. Louis

The Spirit of St. Louis is definately the project that I am dragging along for the longest time. I started it in 1998 while working with one of the earliest versions of 3D Studio Max. I wasn’t skilled enough yet though to get complex parts like the nose section or the tips of the wings finished so I put the project in a folder and waited. Shortly ofter I switched to Lightwave 3D. I pulled the Spirit out of the drawer and tried again, but I still did not get the expected results. Years later I found the files on a disk and thought I should try it again but, whatever happened, I didn’t finish it then either. I don’t even remember why I started to model exactly this plane but whatever it was, I won’t give up. One day I will pull it out of the drawer again and finish it, just because.
Somewhere there are more pictures of the plane and the engine but for now I will just post this one, more to come soon. The posted image was rendered in 99, must have been the first Lightwave attempt.
Creation Date: March 1999
Software used: 3D Studio Max, Lightwave 3D

Plane in the Rain

This rendering is a frame of an animation. I was playing around with weather, cloud covers and motion blur.

Creation Date: January 1999
Software used: Lightwave 3D

Trike

This was supposed to become a car, a modern slick sports car to be precise. After modeling the front, the shape didn’t really go as planed and I turned it around and the sports car became a tricycle. The effect on the top image was achieved by creating a color rendering and interlacing it with a sepia rendering, then blurring the color rendering.
Click here to view the gallery.

Creation Date: January 1999
Software used: Lightwave 3D, Photoshop

Shuttle

This underwater shuttle was made in Lightwave as part of a “Star Trek Under Water” kinda scenario. It was one of my earlier Lightwave models and as most 3D modelers know there is good and bad ways to approach a final shape. This one turned out to be a bad one. The windows were just 1 polygon thin and I didn’t know how to extrude them because of their complex shape. I am sure today I would take a different approach but back then I moved on to new fantastic ideas and the “Star Trek Under Water” world was never born. However a few renderings of the shuttle survived so here they are.

Creation Date: January 1998
Software used: Lightwave 3D