Hallöchen!

I am very proud to announce my first exhibition! It will take place in Offenbach am Main, Germany, from the 12th to 14th of July 2013! About 40 works were selected for this exhibition. Thanks to Daniel Schaaf and the sponsors for helping me have my first exhibition. If somebody is around Offenbach or wants to come to my exhibition, I would be very happy. I will travel there to welcome the visitors :).

I've been very busy over the past year, since I last updated my web site. I made a lot of new painted images since then. I will post them here soon as well. Until then, you can find them in my FlickR gallery or in my DeviantArt page.

I also finished the studies at the university and the thesis for my master's degree in Fine Arts at UVT, where I specialized in Painting.

More details about the exhibition
in the presentation page of "The Brush in the head".

Auf wiedersehen!

Marhaban, beoble!

Since my last update much time has past. These days I finally I had the time to publish new content on the site.

Recently I finished the first year of studies for the master degree in painting. I have new paintings to show here. I hope you like them:

I am also collaborating with the Open Perception non-profit foundation. For them, I created the Point Cloud Library (PCL) web site, several hero images for the site and a few t-shirt designs. I hope you like these works also:

And to not forget, I am proud to mention that I modeled in 3D the robots you see in the hero images above: the humanoid robot and Marvin, the paranoid android as seen in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 2005 movie.

I also made three site interfaces:

And, if you are still reading... surbrise: I am on Facebook! Like me, follow me there, inshallah! :).

Hello, possible readers! :)

I love painting and I find it fun. In the last month I finished three new paintings. I hope you'll like them as much as I loved doing them.

See you next time with more stuff! :)

Hello, precious ! :)

I did not update for a long time already my web site. I did many works recently and I finally found the time to post them here as well.

I made three site interfaces: ICCC 2010, Point Clouds Library (PCL) and IRSCA - Gifted Education.

The PCL web site is done by me using as back-end a free CMS named MODx. The initial version was finished in April 2011. The interface was updated several times, the final version, the one you can see, is from October 2011.

I also made a book cover for Ioana Dzițac and a logo for Uhuru Software.

I made three illustrations on topics related to the future and robotics.

In my spare time I continued painting. I completed the following three works: Baalus Circus, Mad Rabbit and LSD Inception.

Since August 2010, I started collaborating with Daniel Schaaf, a German that makes various travel sites specialized for different audiences. I do site templates, which include the HTML and CSS implementation. I finally had the time, this week, to prepare and to publish on this web site all the interfaces I did for him. I already made a dozen, so in this post I will show just a few thumbnails, the rest of them are available in a dedicated page.

View all works made for Daniel Schaaf

I hope you like my new works. :)

P.S. I updated my CV as well.

E un miros de toamnă în tine... O toamnă ambalată în sclipici și culori de păpădii. O multitudine de frunze caramelizate de nesiguranță stau să cadă la următorul val de vânt. Luminofagii tăi s-au umezit... acum sunt de-un luciu straniu, nemaivazut. Lent și delicat, câțiva picuri calzi se scurg din înaltul cer al sensibilităților tale ce transced lumea laică. Dâre de luciu cald aceștia lasă în urmă... pe suprafața fină ce anii și durerile adunate de peste veacuri s-au scurs. Un sentiment de compasiune plutește-n aer, însă acesta nu este exprimat sub forme palpabile deoarece momentul este inexplicabil. O sursă de lumină pozitivă ce pune în mișcare întregul sistem biologic este undeva acolo, ascunsă în tine, însă aparența de diamant refractar și multifațetat fac incomprehensibil fenomenul și încețoșează procesul de anticipare mintală a rezultatului spre care este orientată activitatea. Ce este oare? O feerie... o dramă, o nebunie sau... stupiditate? Nu se știe exact... Cert este că acum se pot vedea în tine straturile de umanitate așezate într-o non-ordine. Falii considerabile sunt perceptibile. Un haos ireversibil construit bucată cu bucată în timp. Fluxuri externe de non-informații și pseudocunoaștere îți hrănesc stările conflictuale ce-și au rădăciniile în straturi adânci. Astfel, pășești prin lume cu nesiguranță, în timp ce vânezi himere dintr-un balon de pseudosuperioritate. Anii de neoprit trec și trec, nimic altceva nu se vede în urma ta. Val după val, indiferent că este prielnic sau nu, îți alterează traiectoria și menirea. Conștientizezi năpasta și incerci să cauți răspunsuri, să găsești calea și adevărul, dar te împiedici de gnosticismul modern, întruchipat sub alte forme, la fel de înșelător și de perfid ca în trecut, care acum este oferit plebei ca răspuns în timpuri noi la probleme vechi. Asimilând aceste non-valori și acest modus vivendi propus din exterior, există riscul să ajungi un mijloc de răspândire a utopiilor. Apogeul acestui fenomen de poluare este închiderea într-un castel de catifea și diafan.

Prezentul raport se încheie aici. Ce se repetă? Lasă, că știu eu...

Textul a fost scris în 26 septembrie 2010 cu mici completări astăzi, 9 august 2011.

Greetings people ! :)

Here's a quick update with my latest works.

I've done three book covers, each different and special in its own way. I hope you like them. I am now working on a new one for a friend, Michael Auerbach.

Since I got my Bamboo tablet I exercise painting on a daily basis and in December 2010, I decided to take the best ideas that stemmed from my silly painting exercises and to finalize them, so I can publish them. Here are my shy attempts in painting.

I also painted a Christmas greeting card which I missed posting here, because I was too busy painting the images I release in this post. I hope you guys like this one as well, even if it is late :).

And if all this wasn't enough, I also publishing a not so 3D image I made in 5 minutes, by mistake, in 2004, but I only finalized it yesterday. The initial image was a 3D render, but I worked on it so heavily in Photoshop that it is far from the initial one, just the basic forms and shapes are there. I also painted on it - to fix and "improve" details :).

Meanwhile, I worked more on various tiny projects, like designing site interfaces, coding in HTML and stuff for school. I am still aiming at finishing my new site in 2011.

Best regards to everyone and thanks for your time!

Salut!

It's autumn already, and I've been doing quite a few things during the summer. I learned CSS and HTML, yay! It was a piece of cake. I learned, because I already started work on my new site. I hope it will be finished by the end of the year. Coding of CSS/HTML and the design is finished already, but I am waiting for my twin brother to code the required functionality in JS and PHP, but he is really busy with an internship at Mozilla.

Other than that, I made two new images. Actually the first is quite old, since summer 2009, but only now I completed it. It's called Love routine. I hope you like it.

The second image is a bit more weird. The creative process was more elaborate. I used Sketch and Toon for the initial image, then I post-processed it in Photoshop using various shadings rendered within Cinema 4D and even Vray. Then, I used the image as a texture map on a plane in a 3D virtual scene, in which I made the dark, muddy water as a photo-realistic rendition and I also placed a neon light behind the plane which had paper-like shading properties, so light could scatter through it. Afterwards, I got the photo-realistic rendition of the paper and water back in Photoshop for more post-processing. Here's an illustration of what I am talking about:

Now, the final image is here: Failed sunset. The meaning of the image is for you to figure out.

I hope you enjoy these works. 'Till next time, all the best!

Hello, friends!

I am a happy Windows 7 x64 user since 1st of January 2010. Although, since day one I wasn't happy about the default Aero theme, because it is too transparent and the title bars texts are not visible on dark wallpapers and such. So, last week I thought of doing something different. Here's a Windows Accessible Aero theme done by me, based on the default Aero theme. I just changed what I thought it lacks contrast. I've searched on-line for such themes, but I liked none of them. As such, I publish this theme for others who might need such a theme.

Download the Windows Accessible Aero theme (ZIP archive)

For easiness, I prepared several screen-shots portraying the difference between my theme (Accessible Aero) and the default Aero theme. These screen-shots are a mash-up of different Windows elements, in Basic and Aero modes.

If you like what you see, download the Accessible Aero theme here.

Here is a round-up of what this theme features:

• considerably less transparent glass, dark glass
• white text title bars with black glows, so they are readable irrespective of the background of the window
• increased contrast in the title bars for the Basic mode, when not using Aero and I also adjusted the caption buttons accordingly by enhancing the contrast between the glyphs and the buttons
• a much darker task-bar in Basic mode, making the clock and pop-up titles of the applications running much more readable
• a darker Start menu in Basic mode
• increased contrast for the Alt-Tab application switcher in Basic mode
• added a strong white glow to Alt-Tab app switcher to make the the title visible
• made text fields slightly more visible
• defined a clear difference between active and inactive text fields, making the borders thicker
• a more visible highlighting color for menus, pop-ups menus, while trying to maintain the default look
• file column headers in Explorer or other applications, are enhanced as well; more visible and a more clear border between them
• changed the gray text color of tool tips to black for increased readability
• added dark glow to application titles in task bar and in the thumbnails to avoid situations when the titles are unreadable
• made the address bar, search field and the whole breadcrumb much more readable; brighter background and darker texts
• more visible separator in unlocked task-bar and other types of separators or window resize grippers
• bigger close button in task-bar pop-up thumbnails
• made the task-bar icons less wide, more ergonomic, both in Basic and Aero modes
• made more visible the MDI window buttons: close, minimize and restore/maximize
• restyled the whole task-bar to my personal taste

By now, it is clear what is my main purpose with this theme: readability, accessibility, hence the title. So, it is not about eye-candy, fancy designs, or not even originality. I also published this theme on deviantart.com, for those using dA.

Download the Windows Accessible Aero theme (ZIP archive)

Feel free to send me comments to improve this theme.

Hello!

I finished two new images. In December 2009, I bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet to start painting. These two images are the first ones I did with the tablet. Both are just some exercises I did in order to learn to paint.

The latest painting exercise is "Remote village". This painting is done after a photograph I had from the village where my grandmother currently lives. The photograph was considerably much more different. After I finished manually repainting the whole photograph, I began improvising. I added two trees, a horse and another peasant. I also changed the weather and time of year. It was a clear sunny mid-summer day.

The first painting exercise I did was to repaint and to add details to a previous sketchy image I did in 2008. The original image is "Love is a burden" and it is still available on the site.

There's more to come. I still plan to do more types of exercises. I hope you guys like them. :)

Hallöchen!

It's been a long time since I posted anything new. But, here I am with a new set of images.

Since November 2009, I've been working on something new. The initial idea was to do a landscape image using a new technique developed by me to achieve a final image. The 3D scene is rendered in customized layers, without using the usual built-in functionality of rendering multi-pass images. As such, I do not have a layer for each shading aspect, like specularities, reflections, shadows, GI, etc. My layers are obtained by having multiple instances of the 3D scene with different light setups or different textures, thus, in the end, I only separate the lights by type and the color/texture maps. And, of course, for easing the post-processing, I use depth maps and masks for specific objects or class of objects. All the layers are then composited in Photoshop. The actual rendering, if I may say so, is done in composition, where I can control each aspect, much more accurately than in 3D, and it also contributes to getting closer to painting. Due to the endless possibilities, I made three versions of the image.

I used Cinema 4D, Vray to render the images and Photoshop to composite the different layers I rendered. I used Vray Proxies for the first time. I was amazed by the amount of polygons I am able to render. The scene has approximately 30-40 millions of polygons.

The church is a 3D reproduction done by me after a real church which was built in 1821 by the Austrian-Hungarian empire. The architectural style is late baroque, with simple ornaments. The real church is located across the street, where I live.

I hope you guys will enjoy the images as much as I enjoyed doing them ;).