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I returned to CCP full time in the fall of 2006 to work on EVE Online expansions and new projects.
Currently, I'm spearheading a project codenamed "Ambulation" that will enable players to walk around and meet inside space stations using full-body next-gen quality avatars. This involves designing and writing an animation engine, designing a lighting and shader system for fake radiosity, overseeing motion capture and finally working closely with the game design and art departments on the functionality and look of the project.
I began study with work in the fall of 2003, but as in January 2005 I became a full-time student at the University.
In my studies, I'm inpired by many scientists and projects and here are some to name a few:
I participated in the university's engineering departments annual design contest in 2004 and 2005, but sadly did not win.
I served as a sort of liaison between the programming team
and the art team. We were working with a lot of cutting edge technology,
creating methods and software as went along. I worked mostly with the
3d package Maya and Microsoft's DirectX 9, plus I did a lot of Python scripting
in our in-house development tool Jennifer, as well as scripting of effects
and behaviours in the game itself. I also did the technical art work and production
pipeline design. My duties involved planning and brainstorming with the programming
team and art team, so at the end of the day sometimes my work in invisible
to the layman's eye.
I handled some of the modeling of one of EVE's races, the Amarr ( the ship on the picture on the right is an Amarr cruiser ship I built ). And if you see a cloud in the background of EVE, you can be sure that it was me who built that cloud :-). I also wrote various subsystems like the in-game map and designed and wrote a big part of the character creation system.
The game setting is 5000 solar systems in a distant galaxy with five races competing for control of the barren outreaches of space. This is a massively multiplayer game, similar to Ultima Online and Everquest. The game was released in may 2003 and has gotten good reviews from gaming sites and magazines. As of July 2005 it had 60.000 paying subscribers and a strong fan base
Award: Gamespy best graphics 2003
Award: IGN, Outstanding Technical Achievement in Graphics 2003
The @ project was a test bed of artists and technicians aiming to create some sort of cyberspatial experience, where the audience could enter a world built by the artists and visit video art and installatons via a PC computer in a museum. Manned with an array of recognized contemporary artists and designers, this project became a quite big production with one company ( Zoom ) creating 3d and 2d artwork, another writing Director code ( Gagarin ) and the third one doing sound ( Let There Be Light ). Planning and co-ordination was tricky. The outcome was interesting but to me the production and execution was the most interesting part. Seeing how hard it can actually be to take an artist's idea and implement it technically in a multimedia environment while staying loyal to the many technical constraints a multimedia project such as this presents.
The project was on display at National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik and the Art Museum of Akureyri.
Again, critics were unsure if such a marriage of technology and art was indeed possible and if corporate sponsored art created in a committee, could ever be truly sincere and serious. I say you have to participate in a project like this to be able to comment on that :-P.
"Produced by ART.IS and OZ.COM in cooperation with Reykjavík - European City of Culture in the Year 2000 "
The National Gallery of Iceland
At OZ.com I was introduced to the cool world of real-time 3d graphics. Up to that time all the 3d work I'd done was pre-rendered work for print or TV. Real time graphics have come a long way in the past few years and the technology we were using at OZ, while being very cutting edge, was also very limited. Building content with such a crippled medium forces you to be constantly thinking out of the box, looking for shortcuts and tricks everywhere you can squeeze one in. It can be incredibly tiresome, yet incredibly challenging and fun at the same time. I found that in order to get the most of the system, I needed to get my hands dirty and go beyond the tools that we were using. I did a lot of tweaks and hacking plus some fun development work with the graphics programmers. We did some cool stuff and had fun.
I worked on a few projects at OZ. One project, that was ultimately abandoned due to some corporate politics / marketing was an interactive art piece with video artist Bill Viola, sponsored by Intel. I flew out to San Francisco to meet him and was really inspired by him and his work. Bill is one the the few artists I've known that shows both a great intellectual capacity and a deep humility towards his subjects and is able to create powerful pieces of art that are followed through by a high degree of artistic "professionalism" ( if there is such a thing ).
My main work at OZ was on 3d models of Van Gogh's paintings for Intel's Artmuseum.net. I made 3000 polygon real-time models of "The Bedroom" and "The Yellow house", both famous painting by Van Gogh. The projects stirred some controversy on the moral right to "rape" a work of art like that with a computer. There was an article written in The New York Times on the
subject.
Graphics from it were used in the Pentium III campaign, shown worldwide.
Video clips:
VANGOGH.MOV (4.1 MB)Flythrough in Quicktime format
VANGOGH.AVI (3.1MB) Flythrough in AVI format
PIII_TV_AD.avi (3.6 MB) Download this Pentium III commercial and see my 2 seconds of anonymous fame.
Note: The museum interiors were not built by me, just the paintings.
While at Bjork.com my duties included system administration for One Little Indian Records, the record company that publishes Björk's music. I found myself working all possible operating systems, Mac OS, Win95, WinNT, Solaris, and some other UNIX flavors. I did some scripting in Perl and Oracle SQL, built an Intranet and did all the tedious things a system administrator has to do. The Webmaster part was the most fun of it. I did artwork and design for the site, sometimes working with material from Björk's designers and something working from scratch.
I went to Hong Kong for a month. It was really cool. The system I made was basically a digital camera connected to a PC with a scripted Access database whose data was uploaded to a UNIX web server running perl scripts displaying products and images. It worked, I think. The company changed it's business plan shortly after so the system wasn't used much. But I got to go to Hong Kong, so it's fine by me :-).
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The film follows a cool young dealer, Kiddi, through a weekend of Reykjavik's underworld nightlife of clubs, parties, overdoses and random violence. Good fun for the whole family! A film considered "too real" by some and "not real enough" by others, I'm satisfied with it. I'd do it differently today, but then again, I'd do all the stuff I've ever done a little bit different if I got a chance to do it again. It's not that I'm unhappy with my work, I just think I could always do things a little better if I had the time...
Watch the 40 minute documentary ( Icelandic language ) :
Hradi.wmv ( windows media format )
Won 2nd place in Reykjavik's 1996 short film festival, plus the Audience award and award for best director. The films tells a story of an innocent girl in a bright and happy life that gets dragged into a dark dimension of crazy Satanists and heavy metal headbangers keen on cutting out her heart. I don't remember why they wanted to to that, exactly, but it sounded cool at the time. It was also fun to make!
Some text on the 1996 festival ( in Icelandic )
Watch the entire short film ( 20 minutes ):
Anna.wmv ( windows media format )
During the years 1993 to 1996 I worked mostly freelance ( and sometimes for free! ) on media related work, including digital post production for commercials and music videos at "Rauði Dregillinn", online video editing. Shot and directed a few music Icelandic music videos as well. Also worked on freelance web design projects, clients include The Icelandic Film Fund, DeCode Genetics and Bad Taste Records.
This was the first public multimedia stuff I ever did. Steingrímur had designed a cartoon character named Silfurskottumaðurinn / SilverFish Man. He had a weekly comic strip in one of Reykjavik's weekend papers describing the sorry life of Silfurskottumaðurinn, an anti-hero tumbling trough life, illustrating his troubles with women and alcohol. I made 3d models of Silfurskottumaðurinn along with some eerie digital animation loops that we put to video and were part of an installation at Café List in Reykjavik.
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