About

Hey there! Whats up? My name is Marcel. Welcome to my site!
Since you landed on the about page, let me tell you a bit about myself.

I was born in the year 1985 in Breda, the Netherlands. I had a pretty normal childhood, just like other Dutch kids from my time. I liked music, played with legos and when I had the chance I was playing videogames on my dad’s computer. As soon as I saved up enough money I bought my own computer. Which actually was the last computer I bought as well, because ever since then I have been building my own rigs. I played pretty much every mod available for Half-life and even dipped my toes into the hammer editor. I taught myself a bit of photoshop and 3ds max. This was really hard at the time, as there were no such things as YouTube yet. That’s why I ended up playing more games than modding/ building them.

In highschool I learned the basics in programming in Java and animating in Flash. That’s when I decided that my lifelong plan to become a helicopter pilot had to make way for building games. During my time at the university I mainly learned how to gain knowledge, how to cope with feedback and how to use it again.
Travelling became a part of my life, as did mountain biking and driving a motorcycle. I bought my first camera when I finished university, right before I made a trip to Malawi and South Africa.
After university a friend and I started a company in building Virtual Reality applications using the Unreal 4 Engine. I lived in Zeist, the Netherlands for about 5 years and moved back to Breda when my relationship ended. Right before the COVID pandemic I quit my job to move abroad for a change in life. Unfortunately that turned out to be at exactly the wrong moment. I ended up staying in the Netherlands and was working as a delivery truck driver for about a year before I found my current job.

I like to think that you are what you do. That means that for about 40 hours a week I am a 3D generalist and unreal artist working a fulltime job. In my spare time I spend time on photography, cooking and a healthy lifestyle. I also like to follow the news regarding geopolitics, tech (both soft and hardware) and games.

About my work. 

Currently I work at Peek Creative Studios in Etten-Leur where many of my interests meet, it being 3d, innovation, photography, and sometimes, going on MTB trips with colleagues. At Peek I work on different projects and I have the time to spend on my own growth. In the past year I worked on a virtual production, spent time on understanding and working with Artificial Intelligence, deepening my compositing skills on 3d replacements in video footage and setting up and running a deadline render farm. I also get to tip my toes in the unreal engine ever so often while the industry is slowly moving away from offline to realtime rendering. Take a look at my CGI portfolio to see some of the projects that I have done. To see what we accomplished as a team, take a look at the website of Peek Creative Studios.

About my photography

During my childhood, my dad had an analog photo camera. You know, those things with those film rolls inside. I was always intrigued with the process of capturing memories. Later on, he bought a digital camera and it got easier for me to play with the camera. When I graduated I bought my first digital camera for a trip to Africa. A sony Alpha A57. It was a great camera to learn the art of photography with and after 10 years I knew it was time for an upgrade. The last years using my old camera I noticed that my skills were outgrowing my gear and I started to look for a replacement. With all the knowledge I gained over the years I knew I had to step up my camera game and decided on a Sony A7IV with a sony 24mm F 1.4 lens. In the meantime a trip to New Zealand was planned and I wanted to capture it all. Right before I left I bought a Tamron 35-150mm lens for more range. Now I am in love with this camera and take it pretty much anywhere I go outside my daily routine. Head over to the Photo Portfolio page to see some of the pictures that I have taken with it.