So, who is Tom Goodnoise?
Tom Goodnoise is my musician name and one of my alter ego’s. My real life name is Reiner Prokein. I live in germany.
But Tom Goodnoise is so much more. I have also a passion for 3d graphics, software- and game development. And nowadays I am a fascinated image and video AI user.
Musician & Composer
My musical roots goes back to the eighties. Groups like The Cure, The Smiths, U2, Joy Division or Fields of the Nephilim still fascinates me nowaday. My music shows influences from this post punk era, is influenced by grunge to some degree, but also by dream pop and guitar rock and ambient sounds. The result fits into the alternative category. I am what you would call a bedroom producer. And use FL Studio in conjunction with various vst instruments since many years.
My main focus was for many years to write and generate the music and sound fx for my games. As part of the big picture. Back in 2015 when i stopped making games this changed. I did not have a need anymore for game music. And i started to write the songs independently from the game needs. It took a few more years and help from a good friend and now my publisher though until our first album has hit the market. Many thanks David Wide 🙂
Graphics Artist & Designer
I’m a bit older nowadays, i am no digital native. I know the times without smartphone and internet. And before the invention of the pc i drawed with pencil and water colors. I started making graphics at the pc already back in 1998 when i bought my first pc. And picked up trueSpace version 1 at one point. trueSpace was a well known middleware 3d software back in the days. Not as known and big as Cinema4d or 3D Studio Max. But also much more affordable. I was quickly fascinated.
As a game developer i have done all necesary steps, including the game graphics for my games by myself then. I’ve also created quite a few 3D stills over the years. But my passion was game graphics. My page was for many years a game graphics resource for whole communities of hobby developers. Well known in communities like the one for Game Maker. The old page still exists, and is still available. It is called Reiner’s Tilesets. There you can find all the graphics from me, and also find my games. They are freeware. Many of the games doesn’t work at Windows 10 anymore though. It is really old stuff, partially done back in Windows XP times.
https://www.reinerstilesets.de/
Nowadays i create the videos for my music with the help of AI. The results can be found in my youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@TomGoodnoise
Programmer & Developer
I am a gamer since the early nineties. And I loved to do graphics. So the step to develop games was not this big anymore. Over the years I’ve worked on various game and software projects. Starting with the smallest possible beginner game ever, an 2d action RPG in style of Secret of Mana or Zelda 3 for snes. Just much better. Nobody knows why professionals takes so long to develop such a game anyways. Well, for unknown reason *sigh* it did not work out well. So i trashed the project, continued with a Pong (oh, really?), a Pac Man clone, with other words all the small game projects that you need to learn the basics. And returned to my RPG plans three years later. Which i was able to finish then, after three more years of development.
All started with a non programming tool called RPG Maker 95 that i found by coincindence and in which i immediately fell in love with. I continued with a non programming tool called Multimedia Fusion then, which gave me a much higher level of freedom. Here i learned software development. Then, after a few years toying around with 2d games and small one trick apps, i started to switch to the programming solutions to do a 3d game. Blitz Basic, Dark Basic, Acknex Game Engine. Game Core (what a disaster), and settled with Unity 3d then.
At one point, I also worked as a beta tester for a year for Caligari’s trueSpace, my favourite 3d software. However, trueSpace was bought by Microsoft and then discontinued during the financial crisis in 2009. And so I had to switch to the open source 3D software Blender because I simply couldn’t afford the more expensive alternatives anymore, but needed somehow state of the art tools. Which Blender provided. When I started using Blender, I immediately disliked its overly complicated, hotkey-centered interface and workflow. This was back in the Blender 2.5 era, when Blender became a more human interface.
The reason that i mention it this explicitely is that this change has started another big chapter in my life. Not immediately. I got my game development job done for a few more years. And finished one of my biggest and most ambitious game projects with Unity. But in 2015, I finally lost interest in making games and graphics for told reason. It was simply no longer fun. Blender was in the way. I started to hate to even touch it.
Technically Blender was already much more powerful than trueSpace ever was. But at the same time it was so cumbersome to use compared to trueSpace, even after years, and knowing exactly how to deal with Blender. I was permanently scratching my right ear with my left hand. And it bothered me, knowing that it could be so much better. The Blender developers were not to convince back in the days. And so I decided to fork Blender then since it is open source under GPL license. To fix at least the most obvious UI UX flaws. A very ambitious project of course. But my years 0f experience in game and software development payed back here. My plan was to invest a year or two, fix the crap parts, sharpen my tool, bring back the joy of creating graphics to myself, and then continue making games. That for the plan … 😀
It is now nearly ten years later, and Bforartists, the Blender fork which i started in 2015, is still under heavy continuous development. It has grown to so much more than i could have ever imagined. And has its own little fan base and a very active community at Discord. We were even presented at the Bcon ( Blender conference) back in 2023. My good friend Draise aka Andres Stephens has then taken over the project. But I am still heavily involved when time, health and my music allows it. I am still around.
https://discord.com/invite/yKuR77v
https://github.com/Bforartists/Bforartists
AI Enthusiast
Then there was AI. My next big love. I couldn’t believe my eyes when i generated the first AI image with Midjourney back in autumn 2022. They had free generation credits back in the days, and you could share the generated images in your own Discord. What fun. What an opportunity. What possibilities. Then Stable Diffusion appeared and allowed offline image generation. And i was finally hooked. Deforum then allowed a special kind of animation with it. Seed traveling. Quite a few of my videos were made with Deforum. And it has fit perfectly into my decision to follow my musician dreams. Since it now doesn’t take months anymore to create a video, like with the traditional methods. It continued with AnimateDiff. And since last autumn we see the raise of the next offline and open source video AI generation models. CogVideo, Hunyuan, LTX Video, and just newly released the Nvidia Cosmos model. And we get more and more control over the content. Fascinating times.Â
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So, you made it to the end of the about page. And should know me a bit better now. Thank you for reading and supporting me. I’m excited to share my future with you 🙂
Tom Goodnoise – 22.01.2025
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