Design & Code - pixtur.org

Fractal coast

I spent the weekend playing around with fractals. Revision is getting closer and the sketches look more and more promising...

Fractal Coast (2012) - Photoshop and realtime MandelBox fractal

Beta - Final

I finally managed to upload a video capture of our latest demo.

4 years later

Awesome: Four years later, some output of my confidential work for Volkswagen pops up in public. It's quite interesting to compare the actuals visuals with the memory you have about a project that's lies so long in the past and of which you where not allowed to take anything.

MQB (2012) - Stillframe of an animation done with Maya/AE

This is a frame from a 2 minutes animation. It was rendered in several passes in Maya and composed in a huge After Effects project. I'd consulted with the concept, did part of the render and light setup, cleaned up geometry and did the After Effects project.

Burning Man 2011

Wow, it only took me 4 months to upload some pictures from this years adventure to the craziest music/art/drug festival on the planet. Although this has been a breathtaking a experience indeed, it might take another 5 year to regain enough energy and money to go there again and do my own art installation.

Lots of space for everybody (who got a ticket) (2011) - Burning Man 2011

Excessive 2 (2011) - Distrikt Camp at Burning Mann 2011

The temple (2011) - Gamelatron was both: Pure kitsch and amazingly moving.

Fire. Water. Фузион.

Fire & Water (2011) - Extrawelt at Fusion

Shady figures (2011) - Rain at Fusion

Dancing (2011) - Baba Zula at Fusion

Wow, what a trip. This year was my second journey to my favorite festival. Although, the weather forecast already scared the shit out of me, the rain was even worse than what I had imagined. Add temperatures around 10°C, and you sometimes wonder: "Oh boy, what am I doing here?"

However, the music was awesome as every year, and even if I'm too old for mud fights, they still offer the opportunity for some nice shots.

Updated projects

I finally had enough time to update the project section with Finally Inside and You Should. Including some behind the scenes screenshots and sketches.

The tower with details (2011) - Sketch in Photoshop

And after 3 more hours, I've got a nice retro-looking tag cloud for my page. As usual, creating the actual content always takes longest, but it's getting there...

OFFF 2011 / Barcelona

Alien cave (2011) - Poission mesh cleanup applied to a Kinect scan

Sometimes I keep wondering what I am doing with my life. Flying over to Barcelona to spend 4 days in dark, overly crowded theaters (sometimes even sitting) doesn't seem much fun.

The only reason I ended up there was a sluggish application for the CAN+OFFF Workshop. Then, suddenly sitting between Aaron Koblin, Mr. Doob and 10 other hard core interactive media experts was an unexpectedly awesome experience. Too sad, our new version of Tooll2 was not ready enough to be used and so I spent the day learning about Kinect, Blender and geometry conversion tools. I learned a hell of a lot, and thus it was a very nice day. But missed the opportunity of showing off and to defend Windows as serious design platform of realtime content.

Serious hacking (2011) - Kinect screenshot

Hacking (2011) - Photo (c) Undef

Of course the average media style the conference was just my cup of tea: They featured most of my favorite vimeo-artists. Legends of motion design like Onesize, Physalis and Onur Senturk. Still, the repetitive bombardment with state of the art physics simulation, heavy editing and camera shake left me with a certain feeling of emptiness. Like the early years of the demoscene when you got some extra kudos for rending 2000 faces with phong shading. Quite frankly, most animation had nothing to say. After a couple of hours, every channel (how beautiful it may be) that lacks information just become noise.

From the 100+ animations/presentations I saw over the days, Physalis was probably the most euphoric. These guys certainly seem to enjoy their work somewhere between motion graphics and hardware tinkering.

The most motivating talk was definitely the one by Stefan Sagmeister. This time with a longer and updated version of his TED talk about happiness. I love his energy, logic and humor on how to approach real world topics. Thus, giving him the final slot of the conference was a perfect decision. Of course I know that you go to a conference for meeting people (a already knew of the the animations), but of all things I am scared of, approaching strangers is probably my biggest fear. If "having guts" makes you happy, I will try my best at the OFFF 2012.

Hey, this is a blog now.

Back from OFFF in Barcelona. Full with excitement and motivation I forced myself to finally tackle my dead site, fix open issues, and add some content.

So I spent two sunny days with messing around with Rails, MySQL and RVM, I finally managed to get my local MacOS development setup working again. Amazing how complex this whole webspace stuff is, once you want to do it on your own. Being a control freak hurts. But now it's too late to go for wordpress — all the projects are already sorted in and once Capistrano IS running, developing with Ruby on Rails can actually quite fun.

Anyways, you can now follow my RSS feed at http://www.pixtur.org/content/rss

And I promise to provide updates on my random musings and our demoscene projects with reasonable frequency.

Prostcessing Kinect

Spent the evening installing drivers for processing. Nerds ahoy!

Interview on arte-TV

OMG!? Watching oneself speaking is always embarrasing. esp. if you are half drunk during the interview.

Enemy of the state

Evoke is over and we even managed to release or final version of Outside. The reception was surprisingly good. Well, we won the demo competition. Additionally we got some really funny press coverage on one of Germany's biggest IT-news-sites Heise news.

In der Königsdisziplin der Demos siegte Still mit "Finally Inside". Aus ihrer politischen Gesinnung macht die Demo keinen Hehl: Eine Überwachungskamera wird zu vielen; später ist eine Galerie mit Politiker-Bildern zu sehen; am Ende fliegt die Kamera durch eine zerstörte Stadt.

Which could be translated into:

In the champions category "PC-Demos", Still won with "Finally Inside". This demo does not make a secret of its political orientation: One surveillance camera becomes many; later you see a gallery of politicians and finally the camera is flying through the remains of a destroyed city.

Can't wait, to the police searching my home :-)

Screenshot of the day

7 days to Evoke.

Sharpen unmask works (2010) - Screenshot from Tooll / OpenGl

Evoke, we a coming!

Just came back from vacation, and didn't do any work on our production for Evoke 2010. But at least, I got not too distracted by the beautiful temptations of the Adriatic Sea and worked a little bit on the Interaction Design of Tooll2.

Right now, the demo looks like this:

10 FPS (2010) - Screenshot of a wannabe realtime demo

Shopping in Paris

MFX II (2010) - Paris / Nokia N900

Looks like I'm traveling a lot recently. Guess I am not going to heaven because of my CO2 balance.

From Russia with love

Waiting for the next metro... (2010) - Moscow metro

Very surprisingly, my company sent me to Moscow. I am quite amazed how much the city was not what I expected: Extremely friendly, clean and sunny. And expensive.

I played around with my N900 and was quite surprised by quality of the built-in camera.

Geeks can dance / 24. April at c-base Berlin

Together with our friends from c-base, we organize a party to celebrate the death of demoscene culture.

Pixtur will show his favorite productions from last years. After this we will flood the dance floor with electronic beats. Live visuals will be delived by raytrayza and pixtur. We got two top DJs (Ronny Pries from Farbrausch and Fraktral from Icon), barbecue and friendly people at the bar.

Entrance will be less than 5€.