Hello, and welcome!
I鈥檓 Gerrit, and this is my humble homepage. :)
I've created this site as a notebook, diary, blog, a sandbox for hobby projects and study work.
At this time you will find some of my computer graphics work in the sections about Ray Tracing, Three.js, Blender and Creative Coding, but I plan to add sections for other courses and topics I've played with in the last few years. That will include WebXR, WebAudio, Unity and Unreal Engine, Computational Geometry, Algorithms, and Data Science and Machine Learning as well. There will also be a space for music, movies, art and other things that catch my interest.
My personal website actually dates all the way back to 1996 when I first taught myself HTML and started playing with Photoshop. I was living in Germany and hosted it in the United States on my first domain celephais.com inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's short story. It was a playground for all the new exciting tricks I was learning and an archive of my favorite musicians and song lyrics.
Technically, this site was really primitive: just basic HTML, tables, some images and image-maps, and some very basic Javascript to handle click and hover events. There was Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 3, no CSS. Access was still dial-up, no flat-rate. Adding more content to the site was crazy time-consuming because it always required creating new images, measuring, slicing, cropping, etc. But that was part of the fun. I still have fond memories of this special and inspired time of discovery and experimentation not only on the web but also with graphics tools, Photoshop, Kai's Power Tools and his Tips & Tricks docs, Bryce, 3D Studio, SIRDS, povray, fractals, etc. When I think about my early beginnings in the 80s with a Commodore 64, my first PC with my first modem in the early 90s, the very special 'underground' community around BBS systems in my home town and across Germany, Crosspoint, Zerberus, Fido- and Usenet, it's really incredible what this all evolved into in the last 30 years and how much computers, the web and really the whole world have changed.
As life changed over the years, so did the website. In the late 90s/early 2000s I added PHP scripts, a database, and then I created a framework with reusable components. A few years later the site changed into a WordPress blog and a few different themes. After WordPress there was some time with Drupal before I returned to a more static file-based site running on Grav, and later Hugo with Blogdown. Then I returned to basic HTML for a while, and now I'm using React/Next.js. Next.js is still a new chapter for me - there's still a lot to learn. But I like it so far and think I'll keep it around for a while. :)
I hope you enjoy or find any of these pages useful, interesting, or inspiring. Please check back from time to time - I'll continue to add more to this site. If you鈥檇 like to chat or follow me, you can also find me on Twitter (yes, "Twitter" lol), graphics.social, or mastodon.social.