aidanhinrichs.us

Projects

Here are some of my “finished” “projects.” I’m not the most creative person in the world, so I define projects pretty loosely. Some custom Peggle levels, TF2 maps, Blender renders, maybe some videos I put effort into, and some small amounts of art that I find worth sharing.

Blender Work

JACK Posters

In early 2024, I created several Blender renders of the PASS Time JACK. I returned to them a few months later and reworked them to be more pleasant. I turned them into poster-quality renders (7200×5400, misery). You can learn more about their creation in my blog post about the project.

The PASS Time JACK, inexorably vitrified (turned to glass), casting physically accurate dispersed caustics onto the white ground it sits on
Lux JACK
The JACK in a flat-sided mirror ball reflected recursively. Its light moves further toward blue the more it's reflected.
Mirror JACK
The PASS Time JACK sits on a flat outcropping of rock in the mountains at the top edge of the cloud layer. The evening sun bathes the scene in lovely pink and orange light.
Sky JACK
The PASS Time JACK floats on the surface of a glittering expanse of molten gold. Large rocks crumble and float away due to the JACK's power. Some even cast rays of shadow through the dense golden fog in this ethereal plane.
Spirit JACK
The PASS Time JACK sits partially submerged first in sand and then water amidst the ruins of an ancient temple civilization. Towers and bridges jut out of the incredibly clear blue-green water as sands of time work underneath to try and cover them up.
Temple JACK

I also reworked Spirit JACK a second time to turn it into a short ambient animation. The animation also features the first official appearance of my largest Blender project to date – the JACK remake.

JACK Remake

The gaming group I hang out with the most plays a very specific game mode within TF2 called PASS Time. It’s a kind of team handball bloodsport. The central objective of the mode, a kind of explosive ball that needs to be thrown into goals around the play area, is called the JACK, and it’s the central visual identifier of the mode and the group. Many of my individual Blender projects are examples of me using the JACK to push my knowledge of the program further than before.

The model of the JACK that I had used for years was a very lightly modified version of the model imported directly from the original game engine. I had messed with some of the shaders to improve the PBR look of the model, but it still wasn’t up to Cycles standards. So, I set aside a week of time where I would spend at least a few hours every day livestreaming a complete ground-up remodeling, retexturing, and reshading of the JACK.

I swear I’m not that obsessed with this thing. It just makes a solid centerpiece for a lot of situations. It’s alien and foreign while still looking manmade, and it’s just cool-looking enough to stay exciting.

Poolside & Bubbles

I made a summer pool scene to serve as the banner for a summer event in a gaming group. Many of the shaders and models are made from scratch, though the plants are models I got online. Pool chairs are a lot of fun to model.

Then, when Blender 4.2 came out, I got super excited about the brand-new thin film interference shader, so I used this scene to make another JACK render with bubbles that use the new thin film interference. The thin film shader creates the surface colors seen in the bubbles. It was very computationally expensive, so much so that I had to learn a slightly more professional render flow to separate the scene layers and render out one at a time.

The Creation of Stoicism

I made a very short animation to be featured in a friend’s YouTube video about an inside joke within a gaming community. It’s a parody of Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Adam using Team Fortress 2 characters. I can’t upload a video here, but here’s a frame from it.

Skyline Map

Once again within the scope of PASS Time, I converted a game map into geometry for Blender, redesigned a bunch of the shaders, and added rain.

Assorted Blender Renders

Lux JACK 2
Test PUGs Banner
Shining
Hexagons 4
more.tf Scout
Water JACK
IDK
Hexagons 3
Upward Contour
Shadow Over Mannsmouth
Hexagons 1
Hexagons 2

wrapped.tf

Around eight months ago, I joined a very small team of web developers to do some very minor entry-level front-end development for the website more.tf. More is a tool for Team Fortress 2 competitive players to visualize and analyze their performance in competitive matches. It shows matchups, kill positions, and all kinds of other data for players looking to get better at the game they love.

At the beginning of December, the team approached me with an idea they’d been wanting to do for a while: A Spotify Wrapped/Reddit Recap-style event for competitive TF2, where we show the players what they did in the 2024 calendar year, as well as the year’s global statistics for the entirety of the competitive community. They asked me to be their designer. I had a blast putting together some of the design aspects, renders, and other art for this site, and I hope we continue to do it every year because it was so much fun to work on.

Most Played Classes Dark Mode
Global Wrap Light Mode
Player Overview Dark Mode
Spy Triportrait
Soldier Triportrait
Heavyweapons Triportrait
Demoman Triportrait

PASS Time Maps

Dugout

Dugout was my first foray into PASS Time mapping. In reality, it wasn’t my map. It’s a decorative reskin of the flagship map, Arena2. Despite no gameplay changes, I think this map turned out quite nicely! The alternate materials, especially the wood, in various spots, as well as the lighting changes and func_dustmotes, give it a much homier feel than the almost alien Arena2. I chose never to upload this to tf2maps.net simply because we already had Arena2, and this was just a project to get me started with mapping.

Before and after comparison of the location referred to as “Dark” by the community.
Before and after comparison of middle.

Park

In the dusty park haven in the middle of a bustling city, pass_park is the first map project where I got to implement my own ideas! Unlike Dugout, which was purely a reskin, Park is a map I inherited from Kibble Bites. I’ve been adding my own features and design elements since.

A cinematic image captured within a slightly older release of the map, from the base of the gazebo stairs.

Skyline

The other map I inherited from Kibble Bites is Skyline. It takes place in a rainy neon cityscape during the full moon.

A gameplay screenshot taken to demonstrate the custom cubemaps I created for the diamond plate metal material on the demo trimp ramps.

Aquarium

Aquarium is my first map built fully from scratch by myself! This map is inspired by the Georgia Aquarium and the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. I’ve taken hiatuses from updating the other two maps to focus on the active development of Aquarium, so it’s receiving frequent alpha updates! I haven’t made any posts with photos from Aquarium yet, so the link won’t be a photo for this one. You can find the map here.

General Art

Data You Produce

The intro movie for Watch_Dogs 2 uses the sentence “You are now less valuable than the data you produce” and I latched onto it; I thought it was a really cool way to think about how the modern internet treats the user. So, I learned Illustrator to create a large selection of banners to use as my social media profile banners featuring an artistic representation of the quote. The CMYK halftones turned out nicely.

Bobby Blue Waves

I’ve spent years perfecting my wave pattern. You can see different iterations of it on my YouTube channel through the years as I added different effects to it in After Effects. I’ve settled on a set of effects that I’m pretty happy with, and I use them as a part of my “brand.”