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During the summer of 2024 I started to use cables.gl for the creation of my realtime VJ sets. I keep comming back to the tool, using it for various tasks and exploring new possibilities. Often the projects incorporate low poly assets modeled and animated in blender. Other projects include Blender Conference 2024, Modularfield 2025, denoised and Pygmy Tyrant.
cables.gl
I decided with a colleague that there are still not enough veggie/vegan/plant-based stickers around. We both do enjoy the fun and positive message many people put in stickers, so we decided to add our own spin. These are drawn in Procreate, then vectorized. The result is either brought into Blender as a PNG and rendered with pretty path tracing shadows or packed on a single printable sticker sheet.
Veggie Stickers
Denoised
Arduino based fader controller for sending continuous midi Control Change values over usb. This controller is supposed to be bare bones and hands on. Making a DIY device I can easily fit 60mm faders into the build. Many of similar, small footprint, devices feature only 20mm faders.
Fader Controller
The merveilles community created a Halloween mixtape together, I used this as an opportunity to record guitar sounds and learn how to work in a DAW again. The track was recorded in a few evenings as well as the visualizer, which was created with cables.gl.
Pygmy Tyrant
This small animation was created for the motion meetup in Cologne, hosted by Axel Ketz and Tim Piotrowski. The motion meetup design, font, and colors were provided as an Illustrator file and After Effects project. I then used Blender to create the 3D parts with additional cloth simulation, also done in Blender. This was then brought back to After Effects for final tweaks and adding tracking markers.
Motion Meetup
Poisson Steve is a creation by Vigz with Music by Tomo. Their Video has blown up on Instagram with a very catchy song and super cute Illustration as well as Animation. Inspiring a huge crowd of creators online to put their own spin on the Steve the Fish in orange with arms as well as legs. And a song so catchy it won’t leave your brain.
Remaking Poisson Steve
For the vernissage of “Who needs context anywa y?” a photography exhbition by my friend Boris and part of the Record Store Day special at Modularfiled I played a live performance of my current modular synth set. The music was acompanied with visuals on the wall via a high resolution short throw projector, synced to the beat of the music.
Who needs context anywa y?
I did participate in the flickjam hosted by Rek & Devine. It’s a little game jam built around the quite minimalistic, but still powerful game engine called flickgame. The limitations, maximum of 16 slides, 16 colors, and a 320x200 canvas.
Flickjam
During the summer of 2024, a friend suggested we each should enter a small work to the Design in Motion festival, also known as DEMO Festival. I wanted to add something that mostly focuses on metaball surfaces, with small details and refractive elements. The finished piece is a bunch of simulated spheres controlled by elements around them to reveal a few vague shapes in the center of the screen during the 10s of time. Part of the DEMO festival is a nationwide festival screening, utilizing digital out-of-home screens to convert public spaces into venues. As I was not able to attend this public festival screening in the Netherlands, I had some fun and recreated a screen from a photo I found. Now whenever I feel bored, I have a backlog of photos from the festival day to replicate and put my own work in. >
Design in Motion Festival
I recently wrote a long post on Mastodon about the love I had for online community projects in the past; This qoute explains #decemberAdventure in short by Eli , its creator:
December Adventure
On the second night of Blender Conference 2024, I played a 2-hour set of modular madness with live-rendered visuals. I had so much fun that night and had so many good responses the following days.
Blender Conference 2024
I took some time to focus and relax by drawing these ink drawings in a small A5 notebook. As always Leuchtturm1917 paper and black 0.4 archival ink pens.
More Sketchbook People
A DIY project to embedd a RaspberryPi into an Eurorack Case.
EuroBerry Module
With some free time in the end of 2023 I looked into creating full experiences with three.js and TypeScript. This was to learn how to handle import of multiple gltf assets, state management of multiple states in the game, mouse input, continuous level generation, setup of a clean seamless background with shadows, smooth transition between game states and user customizable game skins by dragging and dropping replacement textures.
three.js Racer
Play it here: flappy minute.
Flappy
A simple Importer with multi file support to read routes in the GPS Exchange Format for Blender.
GPX Importer
When Orllewin created a call¹ for ambient and noise music from the Merveilles Community, I knew that I wanted to join. Very excited, I started experimenting with noise, recordings and feedback again. Remembering that I had multiple iPhone field recordings from 2018 to 2022 that had not been unearthed before, things got interesting. The one recording that struck me the most was from 2021, an innocent recording of rain dripping through our flat’s balcony. If only I knew back then that this serious amount of rain days after a long drought would push from below the ground into our own basement. Would capture my partner in a 4 hour traffic jam. Erode the landscape so much that a whole neighborhood would be rendered uninhabitable and cost people their lives.²
Elmet Brae EB01
Quick Exercises in frame by frame animation. Drawing these little doodles over and over again has a meditative quality to it. Each seperate animation took between 30 to 70 minutes to create.
Vacation Gifs
midiTracker is a small music tracker that is meant to be run from a CLI on many platforms. It sequences notes in a nested vertical layout. The UI is heavily inspired by LSDJ and other trackers from the past, present and future. To make it portable and useful on all kinds of platforms I’ve chosen python for it with minimalist curses / ASCII user interface.
Miditracker
This talk is available on Youtube The Quest for Round Cap Curves. Big thank you to the Blender Conference Team for giving me the opportunity to speak at the famous Amsterdam Conference.
BCON22 – Round Caps
Self-Patching is Encouraged is an exploration in working with feedbackloops and self-osciliation inside the mixer. There is a constant rise of feedback noise from the outputs of the effects going back into the mixer. The whole thing is then – similar to side chainging on a compressor – controlled by the inverse envelope follower of the Mutable Instruments Ears module.
Modular Synth Videos II
Even while not playing or working on projects I find myself creating a lot of things everyday. Sometimes documenting said things on Social Media, sometimes just for myself. I spent quite some time on creating procedural systems in 2022, be it either to generate (very limted) game worlds or complex 3D geometries.
Small Things 2022
These animations where once againdone with the creative animation Tool looom by IORAMA. This time capturing single frames out of the looom screencasts, and converting them to highly efficient GIFs and transparent GIFs for the giphy plattform.
Road to 100 Million Giphy Views
Inspired by the Character Design Conference “Pictoplasma”, I tried to work out a little audio/character thing that generates a lot of variants of similarly styled characters. This was once again a mix of creative outlet and learning new mechanics inside Blender’s geometry nodes.
Character Noise
Nodevember is a yearly community challenge, where the participants all work on the same prompts at once. The focus of this challenge revolves around procedural generation, which often is is done in a node based interface, hence the name “Nodevember”. For more info about the community check out the nodevember.io website. For a closer look at procedural generation techniques you can check out the article in my knowledge base.
Nodevember 2021
This is a series of so called tweets from the microblogging plattform twitter which I am archiving here to make sure they do not get lost in the enshittification of social media. These tweets appear in chronological order.
Learning Geometry Nodes
A collection of things I did in 2021. These are in particular order and just capture some of the “other” things, at least the once I some how documented. I was deep into illustration drawing animations to either use as gif or as sprites for small interactive experiments with godot engine. There is also some documentation from the eurorack build.
Small Things 2021
Starting in 2020, I fulfilled a dream and put together a modular “Eurorack” synthesizer. Usually counted in HP (width) and U (height) this build went from 98HP 3U to double its size in 2022. I keep recording my experiments and live performances on this ever growing system. You can find links to youtube videos of the recordings here:
Modular Synth Videos I
Modular Tools is a small application for presentation. Originally setup to explain the core principles of audio synthesis with modular synths. It has been a good exercise and fun project, but has not made it to an official release. (Yet?)
Modular Tools
I did break both my arms during a skateboard accident in March 2021. During the healing process afterwards, I had to attend quite a lot of physio and was not able to do anything at a desk, like most of my hobbies, which are at a desk. Luckily I could use Mirjam’s iPad and draw/animate without straining the right arm too much.
Animated Exercising
From time to time I take small pieces from my Sketchbook and bring them to life. Sometimes as full 3D renderings, other times as animated version of like here. This rat scribble was a lot of fun, the animation is focusing to be very economic, so it’s just little to no redrawn frames, and a lot of wiggle effects.
Sketchbook Rat
A small game celebrating old and not so old skateboarding games. In this quick retro game you can control your skateboard along four different levels, each with it’s own look and play style. Tricks can be done by jumping on rails or pressing the arrow keys in the air. When you mastered these try to combine you tricks in to a combo by pressing the down button after your trick to manual. You can play right from the Browser on Mac, PC and Android.
Picoskate
I spent some time in April building a mesh and surface generator for spaceships. The abstract baseshapes are combined with predefined symmetries, but can also show asymmetrical features. A greeble shader displaces the surfaces and helps define the scale of the spaceships.
Spaceship Generator
This was done with the creative animation Tool Looom by IORAMA. The Animations are screen captured from an iPad and then slightly edited and underlaid with a basic sound design and musical elements. The Piano is also live recorded back to the playback of the animations via the ipad. Proving to me that super professional audio and creative equipment is not necessary to finish something worth making.
Looom
This is a series of daily illustrations for the community event 36daysoftype. Each illustration is designed as a Eurorack module.
36 Days of Type
A collection of hand drawn stickers made to be placed on instagram stories via the giphy plattform. The motives are drawn freely on a single page and then composed as animation. This resultes in heavy wobbling and natural distortions.
Stickers
This is the brainchild of some friendly people at the Blender Conference 2019 and was then hosted by Jonas Dichelle and Luca Rood on nodevember.io. Every illustration is based around a single shader, built inside the Blender Nodesystem.
Nodevember 2019
This talk is available on Youtube Metaballism 2: Going deeper with Metaballs and Shaders.
BCON19 – Metaballism II
Bringing together the scribbles and photographs of my daily commutes. The Sketches are done on my paper notebooks, photographed and edited them with my mobile phone.
Sketchbook People
This talk is available on YouTube Make it Move – Illustration with Animation in Mind.
BCON18 – Make it Move
During the 2013 installment of 36daysoftype, I did dive into creating randomized but pleasing illustrations via automated processes. Little did I know that this kind of procedural generation would not only be used in my private projects but would also become more and more important at work.
36daysoftype2018
Sculptjanuary
This talk is available on YouTube: Metaballism: Metaballs as Swiss Army Knife. Big thank you to the Blender Conference Team for giving me the opportunity to speak at the famous Amsterdam Conference.
BCON17 – Metaballism
This has been an incredibly fun project for All About Space Magazine. Art Direction by the fantastic Jonathan Wells. Thank you for the opportunity, Jonathan.
Darkmatter
This is a series of daily illustrations for the community event 36daysoftype. Each illustration was done within my available free time after work, sleep, and bachelor studies.
36daysoftype2017
Additionally to the more serious 3D animations and illustrations I posted on tumblr that year, I also made some first steps into hand drawn digital animation. Starting with a small duck character and some flour sack exercises. These animations were done in the open source painting program Krita making use of it’s timeline feature.
Tumblr / Ducks
This is collection of gifs and images I uploaded to the micro blogging service tumblr in 2017. Some things are inspired by other creators, others ideas are taken from university projects. All done in Blender showcasing how I use the software for different art styles and levels of realism.
Tumblr / GIFs
While I overall enjoyed my Studies in Cologne, I was not the best in keeping or even archiving all the practial work or the papers we had to write. Something I now dearly regrett as I often would love to skimm through a chronological order of works and classes. So this is less of a Portfolio entry and more a way for me to archive some of the things I did back then.
Studies 2016
This is a series of daily illustrations for the community event 36daysoftype. Each illustration was done within my available free time after work, sleep, and bachelor studies.
36 Days of Type
Art Director Jan Lankisch and frontman Bid approached me in again in 2015 to help them create the Visuals for the latest The Monochrome Set release. This time Bending metallic rings in a shape of Bids portrait. It was a vial aspect to weld the bust onto a plane, to make the portrait pop more out of the circles. The bust is a mix of a photogrammetry scan of myself, sculpting Bids head and face form onto it.
Spaces Everywhere
Tiny Illustration series that was once planed to be printed on 100x100cm acrylics.
Neon
Tentacle
I was obsessed with digital painting in 2013 and finally got a tiny wacom bamboo drawing tablet. While I remember my brother being the better craftsman and (digital) painter, I learned a lot for future projects. There is also my 2013 “Add noise and chromatic aberrations to everything” post processing stack on every painting. To learn (or not learn) things fast I bet on quick studies like I would see from the professionals online at that time.
Speedpainting
Art Director Jan Lankisch approached me in 2013 to create a typographic cover illustration for The Monochrome Set (then under the label Disco Bleu). Bandleader Bid asked for a typographic cover with a retro feel, merging the acronym of the album title into the key visual. The graphic was reproduced on vinyl, CD covers, T-shirts, and other merch. While they were touring with Super Plastic City, I had the opportunity to take some snapshots of the band and vinyl in the now remodeled King George Bar. Hiding in the last picture: Aydo Abay and Axel Prahl, because these kinds of fun things just happen if you work with Jan.
Super Plastic City
vimeo.com Self initated demoreel based on projects I completed between January and April in 2013. Featuring 3D illustration, simulation, animation, texturing, rendering and editing.
Demoreel 2013
In 2013 I was still studying electrical engineering. I still set out to follow some of the most creative people I found online and create an Everyday project. Planning, creating, rendering, and publishing an image made with the 3D software Blender and other tools. This project allowed me to enter a professional creative career.
Daily Blender Render
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