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.

 

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.

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.

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

... 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.

demon update 2

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

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

kind of a slow week

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.

alien dude update

edit: update

So, anything new?

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

fishy

a while later...

boredom speedsculpt

15 minutes so far.

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.