date:03/07/28
Once again I did some work for the little clip project (that isn't that little at all). Some days ago I managed to finish the first phase of the first scene. Nothing more than a guy walkin down the street. After that I had to rearrange my ways of moving the main character - I still don't know WHAT exactly I'd done wrong but the result was that the main character was only able to move into one direction. There was no way turning him round. So I decided to go a step backwards - which means more work in detail concerning the movements of the character. Then I started the first part of the fighting scene ... by now there's only the main character fighting without an enemy but so far it was easier that way. I'll have to look if I stick to that and then fit in the enemies later.
Right now I made some kind of 'intro' to the clip. As the main character is build of primitive blocks only I somehow had to state where his face was. This I did by giving him shades - and thinking of it I decided to make this kinda his brand. So I ... well, just have a look if you're curious. It's merely 3 seconds and once again just playing around with several effects like gravitation and raytrace reflection.

[Shades]

date:03/07/21
Every thought about how complex some things are that we do? Just like placing one foot in front of the other when walking - it seems so obvious and easy to us but is yet so unexpectingly complex and complicated. I figured it out when I made animations for the first scene of the video clip. It took me hours to make the little fellow walk down a street - and this should be the easiest part of the whole project! Kinda amazed I started thinking of how great human physique was that we manage to stand and walk on our feet without falling on our faces all the time - and how hard it must have been to learn balancing on these two uneven clods of meat. Sort of couraging...

Meanwhile I'm thinking of a way to make a proper php-news-updater which cannot accessed by everybody. By now I can't imagine any good solution as long as I don't have the complete control over the server - well, and I won't ever have the control. Maybe my plans of setting up my own server one day are not so useless as I thought. Especially as now my new internet connection will hopefully soon be installed.

date:03/07/17
Got another creative fit today. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to use it for I wasted most of the time renting stupid cars to even more stupid people ... well, no use in complaining. Started working on a project I already had planned back in school - a little video-project. I want to make a certain 3ds-animation, render it from various viewpoints and then put it together and make some kind of music video clip out of it. I'm very curious about how this will end ...

And thinking of video clips, I uploaded 3 little videos, none of them longer than 25 seconds. Some work I did in school (when I was actually supposed to do other work which I did not want to do). They all need DivX-Codec. Unfortunately I found out that by setting up a new OS on my laptop I deleted some pretty good files. Well, no use in complaining about that either...

Shortcut to the [3ds animation] page.

date:03/07/10
Once again no update for quite some time. Showed the site to my cousin who works at some kind of art company. They also get homepage-orders but pass it on to somebody outside the company. Maybe I can get one or the other job there. At least my cuz'n likes my stuff.
Asides from that, my work ... well, it doesn't really 'suck', but it's not what I wanted to do - not even close. It's far away from any kind of creativity and it's underpaid. Well, I'll be renting cars now for the next 10 months or so and then we'll see what comes next.

date:03/06/25
Just tried to fix my ICQ - and failed. Due to the network I'm not able to recieve any files through ICQ, and unfortunately there's no way around this problem. It is said that this problem will be fixed in the next version. Not that I need to send files over ICQ that bad - it's just another unsuccessful part of the day.
Oh, I wanted to do the php-news-update ... well, maybe later.

date:03/06/17
No php-news by now - although it must be a very simple variation of my guestbook. I simply didn't start yet. Right now I'm trying to finish compilating a D&D-adventure from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition. I've got to remake all the monsters and NPCs before I can let my group of adventurers stroll through the forests and dungeons out there.

date:03/06/15
Made a very primitive version of a hitcounter today, just a very short script actually. I'd love to make the script ignore my own hits, but my IP changes every time I connect to the net and right now I'm not sure how else to solve this problem. Maybe with cookies?
The weather made a U-turn, changing from unbearable hot temperatures to almost november-like looks and temperatures. I'm not sure wether I'm happy bout this...

date:03/06/14
Finished my first handmade guestbook right now. It's pretty simple and easy to abuse, so I'd appreciate everybody to be nice to my little baby. If anybody will ever use it - anyway, my next plans are a hitcounter and of course the news-update in php.

date:03/06/12
HAHAA! Finally I got my own domain! And it supports php so I will probably be playing around with this a bit in the near future. For now the old version of the site will have to do it.

date:03/06/03
I'd wish my work had more substance, so I could smash it on the wall or trample around on it a bit.
After a long break I tried to finish the coldone rider - but the animations are so fucked up that I'd have to make them completely new. And I don't want to do this nor do I have the time to do it. Doesn't matter anyway because the nwn-custom-content-scene has been virtually dead in the last weeks. I hope this will change when SoU comes out. Until then I see no reason to finish any work or even start new projects. There's no sense in creating something if nobody needs it.

date:03/05/22
Did I mention, that a computer magazine wants to burn my old module "Der Stille Wald" on their monthly CD? What sounds so great is not such a big deal actually ... "Bravo ScreenFun" wants my module. But of course it's nice to know that someone even seems to like my old modules (and even I don't like this one very much - it was the first module I dared to publish on the german neverwinter-nights.org-page). I was asked last friday. I'll have to look, when the magazine comes out.

date:03/05/21
I've been working at my new job since monday, learning to cope with a 12 years old management-software with not even mouse-input but a lot of unlogical keyboard-commands instead. I always tried to avoid to work in a bank or something similar, but comparing the methods this work now is not so much different from what I'd have to do in a bank. Well, it doesn't help ... I need work, at least to get into the "working-process".
I did no further work for my nwn-projects. I simply wasn't able to. I was so much used to get up anytime and go to bed anytime I liked to and now I've got to completely re-arrange my lifestyle, getting up early and getting familiar with the thought of having only a few hours just for myself. It's quite a change of air and it will probably take me some time to getting used to it.

date:03/05/14
HA! I got a job! That's like a birthday present three months too late!
Okay, it's not what I dreamt of, but it is A JOB. This solves a pretty big bunch of problems.

Still no luck concerning my new website. The line is occupied all the time. I'll have to keep on trying.

Just saw that I have not posted my further dealings with the Drow ColdOne-Rider! I did most of the animations quite some time ago, but there were some problems. I put the different animations in a new order to make it a bit more logical and also easier to animate for me, but after exporting they were in the "old" order again and due to this some of them did not work right. And for the moment I'm not motivated enough to deal with these problems. Here's another picture of the ColdOne, this time textured. Quite a meanie, isn't it?

[Drow ColdOne Rider 02]

date:03/05/13
Once again, no update for a long time. I was trying to solve this problem with the new webspace (www.submers.net) but had no luck so far. The provider does not answer to email-requests and the telephone-hotlines are occupied all the time. the problem is that i made a contract with that company and also already sent them money ... if it wasn't for that, i'd simply forget about it and look for a more reliable provider.

In between if've been doing some more work for nwn. First I did some real brownies after I received a request as a direct response to my quicklings. The brownies were also based on the goblin-model but i made a completely new head for them and also made my first texture from scratch ... whicht looks terrible, but is good enough for a small model like this one.
I updated the cyberspace-tileset, making new wok-sounds for them. The old one had wooden sounds which did not fit for a cyberspace of course. The d20-modern-team wants to use this tileset for a little demo-module - which makes me pretty proud.
Then I took the bull-model from bioware, reshaped and retextured it quite a lot and made of goat of it. And I placed a brownie on it as a rider. They have some issues like the Coldone-Riders, sometimes keeping their arms raised after castin a spell - and I still have no idea why this happens. But after all, I think it's still good work.
Next I did some new Gargoyles. My girlfriend mentioned that the bioware-gargoyles looked a bit like chicken and I tried to make it better. So i formed a new head and messed around a bit with the textures. In the end it looked a bit better in my opinion - but I did not change the animations so the gargoyle still 'acts' like a chicken...
Also did a second gargoyle which was nothing more than a imp-resize with the new head on it. But it was nothing more than a try because i wanted a flying model too ... I was a bit lazy on that one and it needs some more of my attention.
And just yesterday I uploaded the Bebilith-Model. I'm very proud of this arachnid demon for I made more than half of it from scratch. I only took the legs from the bioware-spider, so I spared me most of the animation work. Just had to adjust them a bit. And the texture turned out pretty good regarding my not so great skills in texture-creation.

[Brownies 01]
[Brownies 02]
[Goats & Goatriders]
[Gargoyles]
[Bebilith]

date:03/04/23
No update for quite some time ... i'm still struggling with my new provider. Some terms of payment were not completely clear to me and i didn't receive an answer on my email. And i definitely refuse to call the support-line for 12 cent per minute.

In between I made a new quick project, that took me one day. On request of some guy in the idea database of the vault i made some "quicklings" - some kind of brownies actually. The hair didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, but I'll focus on that matter later on some other project.
And looking through my files I found an old creature, I never finished: the Dark Lord. It had some problems due to resizing. Back then I was not able to solve those problems, but having gained quite some experience with 3ds max as well as the .2da-files, I finished the creature within about 20 minutes. It took me about twice the time to balance forces of Defenders and Hostiles in the little demo module. ;)

[Quicklings]
[The Dark Lord]

date:03/04/09
I started a new little tileset yesterday and completed it today. It's some kind of Cyberspace-Set. All I did was converting my own asian set into a new one and replacing the textures, well, and cleaning up the .set and .plt files. And I made an animated texture, showing some kind of glowing light running on glowing, green wires over a black background. Looks neat and gives the tileset a somewhat busy atmosphere. Should be on the vault tomorrow. I'm sure this will go fine with the "modern d20" hak.
[Cyberspace Tileset 01]
[Cyberspace Tileset 02]
[Cyberspace Tileset 03]

date:03/04/07
Quite some time since the last update ... and i've got some things done. First I made my asian interior tileset "semi-official". Asked some guys on the bioware-board to test it. Feedback was quite good. Then I made a quick new tileset, which took my only half a day. I made a lava-cave tileset. Simply replaced the water textures of the existing caves and mines tileset with the lava-tex. For some reason the explosion emitters refused to word and i could not change the emitters for falls and such things from the old tileset. Strange... anyway, it does look good and got a pretty number of downloads already.

I also started working on this ColdOne-Rider, someone asked me to do. Making the model was very easy. Simply took the model of a green dragon, resized it, scaled legs relative to the rest of the body and bent it a bit different. Then I attached a Drow-rider to it. Done. Animations are a different story. There's no way to use the original dragon-animations, they don't fit. I'll have to make them from scratch. Damn.

Inspired by the great Penultima-Campaigns I did some work on my own module today. I expanded the hakpak a bit, 'cause I just had to add the wonderful Tin Na Og Trees. Had some troubles with scripts (as usual). But the story grows. And I should be able to create a nice, tragic atmosphere in this module.

[Lava-Caves Tileset]
[Drow ColdOne Rider]
[The Legend of the Flute: Parting of the Ways]

date: 03/03/31
No big news. Redcap didn't reply 'til now. And no work done.
I played wh40k on sunday and my tau got their asses wiped by a khorne-army of two friedns of mine. I had the weaker army, less luck on the dices and last but not least, my tactics were really bad. Well, next time I'll fight back...

date: 03/03/26
I sent the new grendal-model to Redcap today. Fortunately I checked the model in the toolset before - beacuse it had one mayor bug! Altough i had changed the position of head and neck at the model, those changes didn't show up in the toolset nor in the game. And guess what - it was a reset-x-forms-problem. Damnit, I'm not even sure what those cursed x-forms DO! Well, at least I solved the problem.
I updated my goatmen. The only visual change is that they are now able to carry shields. I thought about giving them a lefthand-dummy too so they could wield weapons in both hands, but then I would have had to make new animations too, so I skiped that part. The mayor changes on the goaties were on their animation-inheritances. They all inherit now from one of the models, which decreased the size of the hakpack by 60%!
Oh, and I drew a picture of my girl. A pencil drawing. And I experimented a bit with shadows and how they make some kind of relief on a surface. Quite interesting...

date: 03/03/25
Worked again on the grendal. Did only some minore changes: the leg-vertices got a bit reshaped and i positioned head and neck a bit more upright. It was a little bit tricke to meet Redcap's requirements without overdoing it. I don't want to look the grendal like a comic figure.
[Grendal then] [Grendal now]

Then i went on with my nwn-module. Did some scripting for the second cutscene. As I am not the born programmer, I have to write a coule of lines of code and then test them in-game. So it's like an eternal switching between game and toolset. I wonder if such geniuses like Miller or Altaris have to do the same...
[The Legend of the Flute: A Shattered Home]

date: 03/03/24
Didn't do much this weekend. I cannot really focus on my project when my girlfried is around. I automatically suppose, she must be bored like hell. But I had some hours "for me" on friday and of course today. So at least "some" things were done.
I started a new project - I couldn't resist ;) It's again about time to make a new nwn-module. I played a lot last week and now I had to at least try some things ... and I've been having a new story in my head for quite some time. And now all kind of broke out.
I wrote down the story, the places it will need and more or less detailed what should happen where and so on. I did this before on "Kampf um Ulmarveld", but not that detailed. And I changed my approach on completing the parts. Friday and today I made the more or less complete introduction, including a cutscene and a class/race/level-check.

And I should mention that Redcap wrote back. He liked the new model much more than the old one. But of course he had some things, that need changing. Just some small things. I'll do that as soon as possible.
Oh yes, and some french guy asked me to do a "Drow ColdOne Rider". Looks like a LOT of work. I'll start that some other day...

date: 03/03/20
Turned towards the grendal-model again today. As Redcap036 demanded i made it a smaller face with longer horns and better hooves on its legs. I also made the model human size, to eleminate some problems with the inheritance of animation (the model was floating in the air before). Now the model looks more impressive, i'd say.
Texturing the bastard was terrible. I simply do not know how to do this proper. There MUST be a way, i haven't discovered yet.
[New Grendal-Model Pic1], [New Grendal-Model Pic2]
[New Grendal-Model Pic3], [New Grendal-Model Pic4]
[Old Grendal-Model]

date: 03/03/19
Today i tried to make a hitcounter for this site in JavaScript.
Guess what ... it is impossible! I also checked all sites hosting scripts - NOBODY is able to do a stupid counter! It seems like JS cannot import data from extern files. Well, if anybody knows, how to do it, let me know... Stupid language *grmbl*

Redcap036 gave me feedback on my models. He said that they both were 'on the right track' (HA!), but also had some complaints. Especially he needs some textures on the model to modify them ... damn, i thought he could make them from scratch! Well, that means I will have some more modeling to do this evening :)

date: 03/03/18
I decided to make news-updates for this site. I am working on a php-solution for this ... but this will take some time.
I am new to this topic, so gimme a chance ;)

I've got 3 other projects running (besides stuffing my house with furniture and seeking a job):
- an asian-style tileset for nwn ... and it makes me sick! the walkmeshes are a pain in the ass and additionally I've got no further ideas, what more tiles to put into the set. It is quite sterile right now...
- an ushabti for nwn ... the model is done, but the animations are terrible. it's a modiefied frostgiant-model, but the modifications make the animations pretty weird. Redcap036 will do the textures for this model in between, i hope.
- a grendal for nwn ... its on demand of Redcap036. A new race for nwn. I just made a model and mailed it. When he returns a textured version, i'll do some variations.