Oliver Kirchhoff

Two more classes. The first class was about lighting an interior scene, do a time lapsed sun animation, render it and do some compositing in Fusion. The second class is about dynamics and scripting in Maya. I will do a crazy machine which uses all kinds of dynamic effects to simulate a chain reaction. This is going to be fun!

This startup company is so young it's still missing a real website. It was built in this farm (http://www.ferienhof-petersen.de). That's the reason for that company name. Anyway, I'm the TD on a German TV show. We'll have to create a photorealistic character which will be integrated into live action footage.

Live action footage has to be tracked for the perfect matchmove. This includes water surfaces shot from a boat, helicopter shots, green screen actor shots and object trackings.

Some students here at "The Animation Workshop" need to learn how to light a scene in Maya, render it out in passes and compose it with a live action footage. These guys are not absolut beginners. They already know how to model, texture and rig a creature. But they don't know how to light and compose a scene. I'll show 'em the tricks.

The Toyota IQ mini car had to be visualized photorealisticly for a convention presetation. I've got a CAD model which I textured, shaded, lit, animated and rendered out in many passes so the compositor had maximum flexibility...

I worked on two feature films. "Killing Is My Business, Honey" is a comedy with extensive use of virtual stunts. "The Baader Meinhof Complex" has more subtle effects. In both I did mainly particle effects with 3ds max and ParticleFlow.

I introduced Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman to the render pipeline of Trixter. I developed tools and scripts to streamline the workflow with RMan. I also did the lighting of many shots besides my coding work. Escape Studios have released an article about my work, which you can find here: http://www.escapestudios.com/en_GB/technology/news/trixter-renderman.html . The topmost picture at that web page was also lit by me... :-)

Plazamedia is a big player in the german tv business. They develop and support the on-air effects for many tv stations. I worked as 3d and compositing consultant for several projects. One bigger project was the creation of a whole company presentation DVD with movies, animated 3d charts and animated DVD menus.

Hui Buh is a semitransparent CG cartoon ghost character. He had to be integrated into live action footage. Since he was the main actor in this movie there were many shots to do. I worked in the lighting department for this project.

The movie I supervised was called "Das Total verrückte Wunderauto", which could be translated as "The total crazy wonder car"... :-/ Well, at least the VFX were really nice. Besides supervision I also modeled and textured half of the main character. I corrected some animations and some compositings and matchmoved all shots.

King Kong 2005 was the project, and I worked in Weta's camera department. There we did matchmovings, motion capturing, Kuper motion control simulations and roto animations. We used 3D-Equalizer for matchmoving.

I did a full CG shot for the feature film "Sophie Scholl" and some scene addons for other shots. This shot showed the Nazi headquater in Munich in which Sophie Scholl was murdered. That building was totally destroyed by the allies bombing. So I had to recreate it and it's surrounding in 3d.

At "Das Werk" I worked mainly as 3ds max artist on many projects. Most of them were commercials. But I also did two feature films, "The Pianist" and "Das Wunder von Bern", and I did a low budget SciFi series named "Starhunter". For "Das Wunder von Bern" I learned Maya which has become my main tool by now.

The name of the company changed, but the software stayed the same. AnySIM was still my tool. Later it's name was changed as well. I was then called "eM Workplace", for some reason... My job was still to help to develop simulations and to train the engineers.

AnySIM is also the name of the 3d simulation software that were developted here. Many bigger companies use it to simulate many different things in their production, like NC machines, robots, presses, but also humans in a production line. My job was 1st to help these companies to develop their own simulation and 2nd to train engineers to work with the software.

While I was still studying mechanical engineering I also tought other students of all other faculties the basics in 3ds max. There were architects, constructers, but also hobbiests. This was an official course on my university with a final test and all.

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