Hendrik-Jan Smit - 3D modeling & Multimedia Design

Hendrik-Jan Smit is a 24 year old multimedia-engineer from the Netherlands.

" I have always had a fascination for 3D modeling. When i was 14 i used to build levels for unreal and later also unreal tournament. This involved building and placing objects, creating terrains and using basic scripts. These were my first steps in the digital 3D world.

Lateron i moved to 3D Studio Max because i was tired of using Gmax for creating objects. At that time i had no knowledge of tutorials so i was basicly just trying things out using the build-in help files. But i did learn something about rendering, more advanced poly modeling and materials.

About a year later i was modeling and modifying game objects such as guns and sometimes characters for unreal tournament and half life / counter-strike. After this i made some architecture for morrowind, planning to build a mod but never finished it due the scale of the project.

During my study at the NHL, Leeuwarden i encountered the more varied aspects of digital production, working in group based projects. Such as creating animations for lightshows, Web & Flash design, DTP and 3D modeling & animation in Maya. (Some of these projects are still featured on this site)

During my internetship at the Friesland College i was assigned project manager / teacher of 6 media student working in the communications department of the school (website). This mostly involved DTP -work for departments whithin the school, webdesign for external clients and, odly enough, Prezi. (i'm still thankfull to Katinka Cosijn for being an excellent co-worker)

For my graduation project we rallied together 5 people from wich i knew had all 3D -production experience in Maya. The goal was to build a 5 minute long animation; we ended up creating a 12 minute long animation. This was mainly because we had chosen to use a story of Neil Gaiman's Goliath; his stories are hard to translate to screen.

On of the cool things during this project was that we were able to use a motion capture studio for the character animations from which i learned a lot!

We finished the project 2 months late (worked all summer in school while the construction workers were rebuilding the place around us) and graduated just in time. (A full summary of the project can be found here.) 

After my graduation i moved from Leeuwarden to Groningen.. Well, actually i'm still trying to. So i will stop writing now and do that first. "