I'm Frank Naggies, but most people know me as 'ORION', which was my nickname at first, but has now evolved to being my 'trademark' and logo. Being 22 years old, I live in Mönchengladbach, Germany, and I'm studying Gamedesign in Düsseldorf.

I created this website as my personal exhibition of graphical artworks, but it's also an experiment as I tried to find out what's possible with nowadays' web technology.
Starting this website project as a novice, I used online references in order to teach myself and find ways to realize my conception. After one year of freetime work, the website was completed and I had learned a lot HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript, aswell as a webdesign theory such as "accessibility", "ease of use", etc.
All code was written by myself and in notepad. I can now safely say that Firefox simply is the best, fastest, safest and most reliable browser you can get. Opera is not bad either.

As you can see, I like to find solutions for problems by teaching myself, and it's a thrill to see something develop and evolve. I'm often a bit of a perfectionist, loving to go into the small details, while not losing the focus for the whole thing. You always have to take a step back and ask yourself: "Is this still the thing I want to make? Does it fit? Does it feel real?"
Of course, a game design student like me is also a good team player, being member, admin and co-team-leader of zt-racing.
One of my main conceptions is taking everyone for what he is, which makes life a lot easier. Don't moan about others and their quirks - talk to them and help them improve!

If someone asks what my greatest talent is, I never answer "I'm good at this or that". I think it's my passion to walk through the world with open eyes and a sharp sight that makes me differernt than many other people. Observing and trying to understand my environment gives me the skills you need for any kind or art.
2d or 3d Computer Graphics, animations, character design, webdesign, drawing, whatever - only if you know how the real world works, you can create a perfect emotional experience and illusion in a virtual world. "Intuition", "imagination" and "passion" are the keywords really. :)
I guess I'm even a bit of a rarity for enjoying and being good at both arts and math. My skills are evenly distributed and I am proud to be capable of fine arts aswell, knowing how to hold a brush or a pencil. :)

I am using mostly 3dsmax and Picture Publisher, but also a lot Photoshop, Paintshop Pro and some other programs. I often use many different programs for one work, it all depends on what I need, and usually no program can do everything. :)
In my opinion, a good artist isn't only a guy with good knowledge of certain programs, which is obviously required for effective work, though. Because if you have understood the real world, it doesn't really matter which tool you use. It's just like programming - if you have understood how it works, you can learn any language. However, Perl doesn't seem to fit into my head at all, and I'm far away from calling myself a good programmer, when I look at others I worked with :)
Recently, I bought a Wacom (Intuos3 A5), and I'm already loving it a lot, so you can hopefully expect some matte paintings in the future. Baisically it makes all CG a lot more fun.

A couple of my artworks are related to cars from Live for Speed, which is a Racing Simulation Game I love to play, but I'm also involved a bit in it's development and thus credited ingame. I designed the LFS statisics website LFS world, which is an essential part of the game as it is - together with the forums - the heart of the community.
In addition to the lfsworld website, I also made a couple of wallpapers for LFS, which were/are used by a lot of people in the LFS community, which encourages me to heat on :)
Just take a look at my gallery and you will easily spot the cars from LFS.


My dream is to work as an artist in the games industry, and I feel a desire to bring "higher" artwork to games, which means: Playing a computer game must offer an emotional experience, and not only be a way to spend your freetime - it must be MORE.
I want the player to stop playing and stare on the screen saying: "OH MY GOD!!! WOOW!!!!"


Frank 'ORION' Naggies