I'm Markus Baader, founder of MBA Studios, based in Seligenstadt near Frankfurt.
I started in 1992, still at school, producing 3D animations for industrial clients. In 1995, while studying, I founded Spellcraft Studio with a partner, a production studio for cinematics and in-game graphics. When the games industry changed fundamentally after the dot-com crash in 2000, that became the reason to shift focus.
I founded MBA Studios in 2002, initially still working on game cinematics, but with a growing emphasis on architectural visualization. From 2004 to 2009 I was involved in a number of large-scale projects in Dubai. When that market reorganized itself after the financial crisis, the experience with projects of that scale helped me to understand complex structures and present them in a simplified form. Industrial clients followed from 2010, Hessenwasser from 2011, later Mainova.
The years in games shaped my work more than it might sound. Building scenes back then meant creating maximum effect with minimal computing power: detail, light and atmosphere had to be right, and efficiently so. That is exactly what architectural visualization demands today, and the systematic thinking behind it is what infrastructure work runs on.