tentakelblog

and another quicke

2011-07-27T07:27:00.000+02:00

I've still been busy mostly with my UDK thing for the last couple days, and I think I'll soon have it in a state where I can actually show something without looking like a total boob.
Anyway, to get my mind off this thing a little, I felt I should spend some time with ZBrush again. Nothing fancy though.

quickie

2011-07-22T20:36:00.003+02:00

~20 minute speed sculpt. Actually I was just showing a friend the incredible power of ReMesh and ProjectAll. Started from a super simple ZSphere rig, then ReMesh, initial sculpting, then major deformations like the horn and the ears, another ReMesh on that.

I get the feeling that ZBrush backwards spells freedom. Sorry Mudbox, you're out.

Besides that, I haven't been sculpting much the last two days, because I started working on a small personal UDK project. More about that soon.

let's keep this going, shall we?

2011-07-20T05:34:00.003+02:00

Two more.

Frankenstein's bride was a, if you want to call it that, happy accident. I was actually playing around with the brush settings and created some sort of scaly alien brush, that kind of worked for hair too. Initially she was supposed to become some, well, scaly alien bust, but then my Z intensity went up and poof came the hair. I haven't put too much effort into it otherwise, hence the crappy symmetry and polypaint, but I wanted to go with that idea anyway, while it still felt fresh.

Second one is just another variation of my initial female base sculpt. For some reason, all those last years, I've barely done any female models, and I think that's one weakness I seriously need to work on. Far from perfect of course, but I'll just keep churning these things out to get a better feeling of the subject matter.

The basemesh of the sculpt is courtesy of the amazing guys at Sony Santa Monica btw. I don't exactly recall which of them made it, and the thread at ZBC became pretty big by now.
Speaking of their thread at ZBC, if you haven't checked out those guys' lunchbreak speedsculpt, you're seriously missing out. Really, go there now!

girl head update

2011-07-18T20:54:00.000+02:00

I've been fooling around with her on and off today, but still not really sure where to go from here.

and something else maybe

2011-07-18T10:28:00.000+02:00

Started out as a quick sculpt this morning, might turn into something more, who knows. The main reason was that I haven't made anything remotely female for years (save the corpse on the fat guy).

and it's been ages again

2011-07-18T10:25:00.001+02:00

Well, I've grown kind of sloppy in updating this here thing. The last entry is now more than 6 months old and I've done a number of things since then. What exactly? Good question, I guess. Mostly teaching, some jobs here and there and the eternal mission to improve my workflows.
There's lots of things I can't show or won't show or that I just don't remember showing right now. One thing I can and will show, though, is a character I've finished a couple days ago.

Meet the fat guy.

Camo Pattern Generator

2010-12-15T16:02:00.001+01:00

Edit: I'm posting this as an edit of the original post, in case you're wondering what's going on here. I've spent some more time on my Camo Pattern Generator Photoshop action. The biggest improvement is the new look of the digi camo pattern, which is a lot more realistic now, I think.

The usage is still the same, create a new document (something around 1024x1024 works best), select a background color and a foreground color (for the first pattern's color), run the script, change the remaining colors during runtime. You'll be asked if you want to turn the resulting camo pattern into a digi camo pattern.

The generated patterns, classic and digi, will both be seamlessly tileable.

(click to download)

Btw, if you want to use the patterns on a 3D model, say a character's clothes, that has volumes, like folds, here's a little tip for you. Sorry for the sloppy illustration, I'm too lazy to look for my Wacom pen.

Old post:

A couple days ago, I was supposed to use a camo pattern on a flyer I was making for a friend, so I tried finding a decent camo pattern generator. I didn't have much luck though, so I played around with Photoshop to find my own easy way to create camo patterns.

My initial idea was to use four layers, that's one background and three additional layers, with slightly different colors. Then use a cloud filter on the layer masks and tune its levels until it's starting to form solid shapes.
While this produced acceptable results, I still wasn't 100% happy with the way the patterns looked.

Last night I started turning that workflow into a Photoshop macro, and while I was at it, I enhanced it a bit with filters, and the results were getting a lot better. Then I decided to add another function to the macro, that can optionally turn the oldschool camo pattern into a digital camo pattern. I'm still tweaking that last part, but I think the macro works good enough to release it to the public, maybe some of you find some use for it.

Camo Pattern Generator 1.1

(click to download)

It's compatible with Photoshop CS3 and up. The workflow is fairly simple. Your background color will become your background color and your foreground color will become the first camo color. The remaining two colors can be set during the macro.
For best results, I suggest an image size of around 1024x1024. Oh, and the generated pattern is also seamless.

new character.. well, not quite

2010-11-19T21:49:00.002+01:00

I'm currently giving a modeling and texturing lecture for two third semester art courses at the Games Academy in Berlin, and decided to create a character from scratch to cover every aspect of character creation workflows.
We've set the goal to create a base mesh, grind it through Mudbox, retopologize it (so the students get a general base mesh they can use in the future, too), create base meshes for clothes and armor, sculpt those too, and in the end, use the retopologized mesh to create a new lowpoly mesh that includes those too.
The only style guideline I've set was that we're aiming for a slightly carricaturized look a la Brink.
My friend Sascha Henrichs is creating a weapon with the same two courses under similar premises, and finally, far far down the road, everyone will have a character with a weapon and hopefully see him or her running around in UDK.

So far we've created a simple base mesh in Maya and used this for the initial sculpt.

Then we've spend some time on the initial sculpt. Although I've been constantly saying to keep it simple and to only block in the volumes, most people got drawn into the detail work - in the end, I did too. But I guess it's a good thing, because I've felt that my understanding of anatomy improved quite a bit (the lecture is about modeling techniques, not anatomy, in case you're wondering).

As I said, my level of detail is probably a bit too high for what I had planned, but sculpting this was so much fun that I had a hard time letting it go.
Today we exported and re-imported our 0-Level-mesh to create UVs, started painting in some edgeflow guidelines and started retopologizing.
The next step will be to finish the retopo, create a unique UV layout and bake a displacement map from the initial sculpt on the retopo UVs, either by using Mudbox itself, or XNormal. I guess we'll do both and compare the results.
Then, we will use the Sculpt from Displacement Map feature in Mudbox to recreate the details from the initial sculpt on the retopologized mesh. After that, as I wrote above, Clothes, Armor, etc.

It's been a lot of fun so far, aside from the occasional bug-driven rage (usually not on my end), and I really look forward to see the results of this little adventure.

a little something I've just been playing with

2010-11-16T04:18:00.001+01:00

In lack of a proper update, here's something I just made. Tonight I suddenly had the idea to make a simple and reusable eyeball setup, which I, well, did.

I wanted to keep it portable, so all the materials are procedural. It's basically a sphere with a black and white ramp for transparency and an iris with a layered shader that blends together a stretched fractal shader and a green to brown ramp. In addition, there's another layered shader with a fractal shader and a spherical ramp in the reflection pass.

The rotation of the eyeball is controlled by an aim constraint, and the iris controller activates two blend shapes. I could have optimized it to use only one blend shape, but on the other hand, I'd only spent 15 minutes on that one so far and I was positivley shocked by the result already.

Following my nature of chasing shiney things when I have nothing else to do, I decided to do something else instead of optimizing the blend shape issue. Since I'm mostly working on video games and this setup isn't really game ready, I tried to apply the blend shape trick to a lowpoly mesh. I used the highpoly version to bake the normal and color map, added a loop around the pupil which I'd need for animating the dilation, and set up two blend shapes again (I know I should have used only one this time, but as I said, shiny things > responsibility, sometimes).

The whole thing worked like a charm, and even if not every game engine supports blend shapes, I could achieve the same effect with a single joint inside the eyeball, that's parented to it's corresponding eye joint.

Enough with the talk, here's a video to demonstrate. Left side is high poly, right side is low poly.

I've also started working on a bone driven facial rig a few weeks ago, and I guess I could combine the two. Ignore the retarded animations please.

this is the new shit

2010-10-18T02:26:00.012+02:00

Well oh my god, it has been ages since I updated this blog.
I've been crazy busy though, and much has happened in the mean time. Here's the story.

My work on Depth is complete. I've modeled, textured and rigged the three shark classes, and I tell you, that rig I've built is wicked. So far I can't show anything to the public, but I'll check with the team lead if it's possible to share a little bit of it with the world.
In the meantime, check out the website for some awesome sneak peaks of the game play.

Right after Depth, I started doing contract work for Piranha Bytes, most infamous for their incredibly awesome Gothic series.
Since they announced at this year's gamescom that they're working on the sequel to their equally awesome 2009 hit Risen, I can now safely tell that I created part of the environment models for Risen 2.
Getting this job has to have been the high point of my career, because I'm a huge fan of their work and Gothic I actually is the reason, I got into game development myself.

Last month I finished the work I was doing for Piranha Bytes, and went on to another project. This time something rather different. Hocoma AG, a swiss company specializing in robotic rehabilitation, hired me to do a graphic redesign for some of their games and deliver the assets that go along with it. I can't tell much about this job, and unless you're in therapy because of some spinal trauma, chances are that it'll be a while before you see anything of that.
I haven't worked on any serious games before, but I cherish the experience and I think my karma raised a bit, for doing something that actually helps curing people.

Now here's a special one. I just started my ninth website re-haul. That's nine in nine years. The new site will be leaner, with less content and a bit less chaotic, I hope. I'm still considering whether or not I should put in some content of my old website, or just make a clean start from scratch. Either way, the new website is online as of today, and I'd be happy if you'd stop by and have a look.

And last but not least, I finally had some spare time and managed to finish a model that was on hold for a much too long time.

march

2010-03-16T12:11:00.001+01:00

This whole thing seems to turn into a monthly blog post. Gotta do something about that. For now though, here's an update.
Earlier this month, I joined a very cool Indie Dev Team for their project Depth, where I will be modeling the sharks.
In other news, Radon Labs released the Prequel to their 2008 game Drakensang, River of Time, for which I made a couple of characters too, these guys for example.

So.. what else is new.. I found this cool online drawing application, which apparently has been around for a while, but which I was completely oblivious of. It's called Harmony, and you definitly should give it a try.
Initially, the results will probably look like this.

But the images you create, or even just random shapes, are a nice base to enhance in photoshop, or make to custom brushes.

I guess that's it for now, I hope the next post will arrive before april.

february

2010-02-11T11:19:00.001+01:00

It is indeed. Despite the fact that I haven't posted in a while, I've not been that lazy actually.
Last weekend (January 29th-31st) I was at the Global Game Jam in Munich with a couple friends - if you're not familiar with the concept, it's about creating a video game within 48 hours.
So far so good. Our problem was, I think, that we've been a little too overambitious. We had a certain visual quality in mind and in the end, we managed to finish most of the assets, but couldn't put it together in time.
Nonetheless, it was an amazing experience. Here's what I made during that time. Everything was modeled, unwrapped and textured in less than 40 hours.

After the GGJ, I've been home sick for a week, because I caught a rather nasty cold. Today I finally felt better, and to celebrate my first day without severe headaches, I began rigging Needlefeed McPenishead. Unfortunately, rigging isn't like riding a bike, and I haven't built any rigs in quite a while, except a couple rather simple ones for cartoon characters.
So it's safe to say that I'll most likely build it again, and perhaps again, maybe even again, until it does what I want. Plus I could use the practice.
Anyway, I've thrown a basic rig together today and made a little test animation on it.

Needlefeet McPenishead idle test 01 from Ralf Straube on Vimeo.

edit 2010-02-08: Still the same crappy rig, but I really wanted to try making that running animation for him, that I had in my head for a while now.

Needlefeet McPenishead run test 01 from Ralf Straube on Vimeo.

Oh, and there's also the construction shot, rendered in Marmoset:

back from ffm

2010-01-21T04:51:00.001+01:00

Today I came home from Frankfurt, where I've spent monday and tuesday giving a texturing class at Games Academy FFM. I used a model I made last week during a class I was giving at Games Academy Berlin, about concepting, sculpting and retopologizing.
There are still a couple things here and there that I'm going to tweak, but the character, creatively dubbed Needlefeet McPenishead, is more or less done. As soon as I have a little spare time, I'm going to rig him and try a few animations, that are playing in my head already.

I was actually thinking about rigging him on the train back to Berlin, but decided to rather spend my time otherwise. I hadn't painted in a few days and was developing an urge to do just that.

birdguy

2010-01-16T15:39:00.003+01:00

I got sort of bored with the concept, so I decided to finish him a bit prematurely. Might turn him into a 3D character some day.

been a while

2010-01-10T05:40:00.001+01:00

Apparently my plans of painting at least one picture a day came at a halt, because new year's eve took it's toll. Anyway, after a week of recovery, I'm trying to get into the flow again.

today's picture

2009-12-31T03:20:00.001+01:00

This is the only one I finished today, made in the train from Frankfurt to Berlin, and took about an hour, I guess. It also got me some weird looks from people walking by.

playing with Alchemy again

2009-12-29T23:17:00.001+01:00

Today's picture started as a sketch in Alchemy, that I made a couple weeks ago. Actually, it was just a bunch of shapes thrown together. Today I found it in my WIP folder, put it in Photoshop and used it as a base for today's work.

today's work

2009-12-28T23:17:00.001+01:00

There's a little less to show today, because I've spent most of today on swiss highways and in comic stores.

more quickies

2009-12-27T16:38:00.001+01:00

This whole "one speed painting a day" idea seems to work pretty good so far. I hope I can keep it up a little longer.

Yesterday I visited the Giger museum in Gruyere. Later we had Dinner with relatives of my girlfriend, and because I'm french-retarded, I spent the time drawing. Looks like the visit to the museum left it's marks.

couple new things

2009-12-26T10:41:00.001+01:00

I tried to get a hang on Torvenius' speed painting techniques, with mixed success, but the process was fun and I'm definitly going to do this more often. 35 minutes in Photoshop.

This fella was made the other day on a train trip from Basel to Geneve, about 30 minutes, plus another hour of refining the day after.

almost there

2009-12-05T03:33:00.001+01:00

I had a little time this week and put some more gear on the dude, and I think the silhouette turned out quite neat. UVs are about finished, I just need to do the layout. I hope the textures won't take too long, and I can finally put an end to this travesty.

something I wanted to finish

2009-11-18T00:04:00.001+01:00

Over the past couple months, I've been quite busy, but this week I have a few days off, so I can finally finish that guy. He's not done yet, still working on the textures, but considering the thin concentration of updates in my blog, I felt like posting it anyway.

another new doodle

2009-11-04T01:24:00.001+01:00

Another random doodle at the same friend's character modeling keynote. Colors! on NDS

new doodle

2009-11-02T18:26:00.001+01:00

Random doodle at a friend's birthday dinner. Colors! on NDS

scribbletime

2009-09-25T11:19:00.001+02:00

Sorry for the awful video quality, I should probably get a new cam. I just felt like recording something, though. Nevermind.

micro update

2009-09-22T03:03:00.001+02:00

I've recently been pretty occupied, hence the lack of updates. Today I happened to grab my marker pens and to get my mind off things, I scribbled a little. The emphasis is on scribble. Here is how it works. Paint some random shapes with a brighter marker and rotate the sheet until you see a form. Develop that form with an ink pen, accentuate with darker markers.
Here are some of the more interesting results. 30-60 seconds each.

omg

2009-09-04T17:16:00.001+02:00

fap fap

narf

2009-08-14T02:51:00.001+02:00

30 minutes Alchemy + Photoshop, I've been trying to adapt some Andrew Jones techniques, but got carried away into a different direction.

I never really called it finished...

2009-07-13T06:10:00.000+02:00

... so I decided to spend a couple more hours on Trunkbert's textures and a few details.

Also, a little time was spent on the chainsword.

back from FFM

2009-07-08T21:09:00.001+02:00

I've just returned from the Games Academy in Frankfurt, where I was giving a Maya introductional class for the last couple days.
Here's what I came up with, been a while since I last did hard surface modeling.

I have no idea why I've never done that before...

2009-07-02T22:35:00.001+02:00

... but here it is, my first ZBrush timelapse video.
48 minutes realtime, 500% video playback speed.

edit: It didn't justify a new post, but here's another one. About an hour and a couple minutes, made from a cube again.

not quite

2009-06-25T16:47:00.001+02:00

In lack of proper updates, here's something I made to demonstrate various texturing techniques for a class today. This is in no way finished, nor will it ever be.

What am I up to? Let me show you.

2009-05-28T16:24:00.001+02:00

It's been a while since I posted any work, so here we go.
First one is what I'm working on right now. It's based on an old ZBrush sculpt that I made last year - still WIP of course, but I'm pretty satisfied with the changes I made to the design. The armor will most likely undergo a redesign too, something a little more indian, I guess (feathers, not dots).

The next one, Trunkbert, is a model that I made for the articles about normal mapping, that I mentioned in the last post. It's finished, but chances are that I'll revamp him one day, because he's a little plain.
For more Trunkbert-related images, hit my portfolio or my deviantArt gallery.

And finally, something I made for a class I was teaching. It's based on a resin model of the Pirates of the Carribean smoke cannon, so the design credits go to Disney Studios, I guess.
Again, for more images, hit my portfolio or my deviantArt gallery.

See? I wasn't that lazy after all.

Providence

2009-05-13T09:28:00.001+02:00

I've been kinda lazy on the updates, I know. So what's new? I recently published two articles about normal mapping in M! Games magazine, and I'm in Providence, RI right now. Why? Here's one of the reasons:

demon update 2

2009-03-05T17:58:00.001+01:00

Because I finally finished most of my comission work, I found some time to work on the ZSPhere demon again. Yay me.

ZSPhere Demon WIP turntable from Ralf Straube on Vimeo.

and another one

2009-02-10T06:03:00.002+01:00

Something else that's brewing in my kitchen right now. My first serious attempt at working with ZSpheres.

Fishguy texture update

2009-02-10T05:44:00.001+01:00

The basic colors so far, details are yet to come.

Codename: Fishguy

2009-02-02T00:58:00.001+01:00

I always come up with the greatest names. But despite my natural grip on unique and interesting titles for anything from blogposts to characters, I really want go put some more effort in it this time. Hence the "Codename" part.
Anyway, it's been a while since I last worked on him, because I had some actual jobs last week, and also managed to catch another cold, after my last one ran out two or three weeks ago. I'm really glad.
The fishguy was nearly finished anyway, just missing hands, which I gave him tonight. I also tweaked some of his features a little, to accomodate him with the design choices I've made.
On with the pictures.

baby got legs

2009-01-20T01:45:00.001+01:00

I couldn't help it...

2009-01-18T11:31:00.001+01:00

... but I felt the urge to get serious with the fish guy. Hopefully, this time I can force myself to finish something.

edit: update

kind of a slow week

2009-01-16T12:23:00.001+01:00

I didn't really have the time/motivation to work on anything this week. But tonight I finally managed to force myself into learning the ZBrush retopology tools. Until now, I always used Maya's Live Object for retopologizing, and didn't really try to get into the ZBrush tool, because it felt kind of awkward. Anyway, after playing around with it for a few hours, I'm totally sold. The adaptive projection feature is so awsome, I could cry.
So, nothing really new, I just took an old bust I had sitting around (posted earlier), and played around with that. I think I'll spend some more time on the fella.

edit: Update. I'm beginning to develop CTS, though.

edit 2: Last update for tonight.

Friday already?

2009-01-09T15:37:00.001+01:00

It's been a while, but I finally managed to paint something on my DS again. I've also spent the better part of the night filling various sketch pads and starting a new acrylics painting. Busy night.

alien dude update

2009-01-03T01:58:00.001+01:00

edit: update

So, anything new?

2008-12-30T17:03:00.001+01:00

Not really. I haven't really worked on any of my WIPs recently. I did, however, start something new and entirely pointless today. Hooray, another model that I will probably never finish.

edit: Update

8 degrees, cloudy

2008-12-22T16:27:00.001+01:00

I just started something completely out of the box. A scifi space marine. How do I keep coming up with mindblowing innovations like these? I don't know, it's a gift, I guess.

Anyway, not much to show yet, but I felt bad for not posting for so long, so that'll have to do for now.
I haven't been too lazy though. Actually, I've been working on my portfolio. As soon as I get green light from my former employer, it'll go online.

update: Space Minotaur!!

On the other hand, I'm not sure if this is going anywhere..

I'm about to call it done

2008-12-15T08:03:00.002+01:00

I've spent way too much time on him already, so I better move on to something else. I also tweaked the proportions a little. There'll be some bigger pictures along with 360° turnarounds in my new portfolio within the next couple of days.

edit: since I'm already playing around, here's a preview.

hard to believe, but it's a girl

2008-12-11T04:50:00.001+01:00

Really. I haven't been modeling or painting women for months, so I thought I kind of missed something. It's kind of embarrassing, but I've made it during our local IGDA chapter meeting. Which isn't to say that it was boring, just that I've heard most of it before, already.

update on the steampunk guy

2008-12-10T01:13:00.001+01:00

I still need to paint some hair, I guess

oh great, another brawny mutant

2008-12-08T00:55:00.001+01:00

Just what the world needs.
I've been in a stupor that probably results from lack of sleep, for the whole day. Nonetheless I've spent our sunday brunch doodling in Colors! again, on a small something I just finished.

took me a while

2008-12-05T01:41:00.002+01:00

I haven't worked on this character in a while, but managed to find some time and motivation tonight. Still not quite finished, but it's coming along, I guess.

fishy

2008-11-28T00:40:00.001+01:00

a while later...

2008-11-21T18:24:00.001+01:00

boredom speedsculpt

2008-11-21T15:06:00.002+01:00

15 minutes so far.

2008-11-19T18:40:00.003+01:00

That was actually my first try, sculpting a child. It doesn't look too healthy. I should have probably used a reference, but then again I thought doing it without might help me see my mistakes afterwards.

In other news, here's something I made in Colors! on Nintendo DS again. I started it in the sushi restaurant and kind of finished it the next morning during brunch.

a doodle I started yesterday

2008-11-13T14:48:00.002+01:00

Made in Colors! on Nintendo DS. For those who aren't familiar with Colors!, it's a free homebrew Painting application for Nintendo DS and (not free though) for iPhone. For more information, visit the Website.

face update

2008-11-12T18:27:00.001+01:00

I was kind of busy over the weekend, but here's a little update on the face.

2008-11-08T11:26:00.002+01:00

The unwrapping is done, and I made some minor tweaks.

little update

2008-11-07T17:09:00.001+01:00

I think I'm about done with the modeling.

2008-11-07T05:22:00.004+01:00

A while ago I was asked to do some texturing classes at Games Academy in Berlin. I never really thought much about sharing my knowledge with a bunch of strangers, but then again, I like money, and maybe the experience would be rewarding, so I thought I should give it a try.
Last tuesday was my first day.
Since I wasn't really sure about their knowledge of the basics, I decided to do a little unwrapping workshop in my first few lessons. The results were mixed.
However, I didn't want to take any of my old characters and none of the characters I've made at work, so I spent the night before on a new model, which I more or less designed on the fly.

In the end, I wasn't too happy with it, but I was tired and it would do the job.

While unwrapping him with the kids, I came to think that he had some potential, and that I wouldn't abandon him after class. Tonight I woke up at 3am and knew the direction I wanted to take with him. Still WIP, obviously, but I think I like it.

First post. Yay.

2008-11-07T05:00:00.005+01:00

Since I don't yet know who will read this blog, I think I'll start with a little introduction. The name's Ralf, I create videogame characters for a living, and currently I'm working at Radon Labs in Berlin, Germany. My most recent shipped title is Drakensang, which got kind of nice press here in Germany - how well it's going to do in the international market, remains to be seen.

This blog will be mostly about my private work, 2D, 3D, digital and traditional media, with lots of work in progress images. That is, if I can actually stay focussed on it long enough. We'll see.

For some samples of my stuff, feel free to visit my website or my deviantArt gallery.