aidanhinrichs.us

Projects

Here are some of my finished “projects.” I’m not the most creative person in the world, so “project” is loosely defined. 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

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. It was a bunch of fun to make the pool chairs especially.

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 all the color seen in the bubbles. It was very computationally expensive, to the point that I had to learn a 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 The Creation of Adam using Team Fortress 2 characters. I can’t upload a video here, but here’s a frame from it.

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 Arena2. Despite no gameplay changes, I think this map turned out quite nicely! The wood and different materials 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.”