and another quicke

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

~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?

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

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

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

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.

 

new character.. well, not quite

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.

this is the new shit

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

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

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

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

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.

today's work

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

couple new things

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

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

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.

narf

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...

... 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.