I have extensive knowledge of the Unreal Engine (from the 1st generation onwards)
and 20 years of experience in level-design, texture-creation, digital photography and graphics-design in general
with a solid understanding of colour, lighting, physics and gameplay.
Today I'm specialized in custom high-resolution texture and PBR material creation for future videogames and animations.
Brief history / biography /résumé:
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As young teenager, back in 1999, I started creating levels for Unreal Tournament (Unreal Engine 1) as a hobby,
and within a few years I managed to master almost all features of the Unreal Engine 1, 2, 2.5 and 3.
With experience in digital photography I was able to integrate selfmade custom textures into the game,
and over the years I built 3d multiplayer levels that exceeded the game's retail graphics by far.
I was one of the few technical artists around, one of those international enthusiasts who spent many years
creating high-end custom content for Unreal Tournament, UT2004, UT3 and their modding communities.
For 20 years, nicknamed "Pandemonium" I released multiple high-quality levels for Unreal Tournament and UT2004,
coded mutators modifying the gameplay and made 150+ custom textures, partially for famous community mappacks.
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My coding work includes a new weaponbase that spawns selectable items either randomly or in a generic order,
available also as an ingame mutator offering the option to place this new random-weaponbase into any map you like.
Another mutator modifies teamgame based gametypes by forcing all players to spawn in their enemie's base,
this makes gametypes like Capture The Flag even more frantic and fast-paced.
My texturepacks PandemoniumTex01 and PandemoniumTechTex include more than 150 selfmade custom textures,
which were used by other leveldesigners in their projects. The latter was also released with one of the FoT-mappacks.
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As a high-classed designer I was also moderator at unrealed.de, the biggest german Unreal development website,
where I taught other designers how to use the Unreal Engine and it's leveleditor for more than 15 years.
Allthough most of us were developers on absolute professional levels, we didn't get paied for what we created.
It was our true passion to keep the Unreal Tournament series alive and up to date, for decades.
We built state-of-the-art multiplayer levels that exhausted our hardware and unleashed the most outstanding graphics,
we explored the engine's limits and continuously redefined the standards for future videogames.
We, the Unreal modding community of the early century, made Unreal Tournament become the greatest and the best,
the most popular and the most advanced first-person multiplayer shooter series of all time.
We made Unreal Tournament legendary.
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UNREAL Engine 3 and 4 changed everything.
The need of additional 3d-modeling software and the advanced use of normal- and displacement mapping
forced designers to specialize and led to a massive change in the overall game-design pipeline.
3d-artists, texture-artists, lighting-artists, gameplay-designers, .. countless new special fields evolved, as graphics
got more and more complex. Levels were no longer made by a single person, instead several professional designers
started cooperating as a team. Ultimately a whole crew of people had to combine their work to create a single scenery.
The possibility of building entire worlds on your own using Unreal Engine only became a thing of the past, 'content creation'
with external programs became essential, and leveldesign faded to 'adding assets made by others into pre-existing worlds'.
Complexity of graphics and the wide range of necessary skills somehow started to black out individual creativity.
Leveldesign lost it's magic, and with a shrinking community-support the next generation's UT titles weren't nearly as fortunate.
After the complimentary release of Unreal Engine 4, by far the world's best openly available graphics engine ever created (!),
EPIC Games officially canceled any further development of Unreal Tournament 4 somewhere around 2017.
After 18 long years ... a wonderful and highly creative era came to an end.
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Where am I now?
Europe didn't offer any 3d-design university courses in the early 2000s and 'Unreal' was still unknown to the masses.
I was simply way ahead of time. Now raising a family with a local non-design-related job for a living I always spend
my freetime on developing further.
The last years I focused on digital photography and photorealistic texture and material creation.
I truly believe realistic textures are the most important factor to ensure success of a game.
Textures define the overall look, and outstanding graphics is what make games interesting, unique and superior.
Today I am a digital photographer on a professional level (website: www.ungewohnte-blicke.de), and I combine
these skills with my in-depth-knowledge of the Unreal Engine to create unique photorealistic videogame graphics.
I have 15+ years of semi-professional experience in digital photography, graphics-design and texture-creation.
I am able to create custom seamless photorealistic high-resolution PBR materials out of self-taken photosources,
fully implemented into Unreal Engine with adjustable diffuse-, normal-, displacement- and specularity-maps,
ready-to-use for upcomming Unreal Engine based videogames, renderings or modern cinematic animations.
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Here is a youtube playlist showing some seamless 2k and 4k displacement materials I made for Unreal Engine 4:
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I am not available for remote work at the moment. But stay tuned for updates!
I just recently jumped into this rapidly evolving rabbithole called Unreal Engine 5.
Ready again for new adventures. Ready again to make something UNREAL.
