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.

a little something I've just been playing with

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

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.