I realized this project together with Thomas Heller as a term project in university. We created a cheap and easy solution for facial motion capture with decent results. Watch the above video for a finished animation and an explanation on how it has been made.

At first we experimented with an existing 8-camera-system and 3D tracking in Realviz Movimento. The tracked points have then been mapped onto a muscle-like shape, as seen in the video below. This shape then deformed the face of our test model. Our final solution uses a head-mounted rig and a high-speed camera for stabilization and to minimize the need for additional calculation after the capturing.

The third video was made in less than five days and has never been finished. But it proofs, that we can capture two different people and match their movement to their voice acting.

A traditional animation done in Photoshop with a Wacom Tablet. The character walks to an object, stops, looks at it and then decides to lift it. He carries the heavy object for a few steps and fails to lift it over his head.

In this small compositing and audio exercise a vampire is running towards the camera but gets incinerated before he reaches it. The room has been photographed with a SLR camera and myself as a vampire has been shot in front of a green screen. The compositing has then been made in After Effects and the audio in Logic Pro.

This is my first finished ZBrush sculpture. It is a dryad in agony, whose pain and misery is caused by the human destruction of nature. She is connected with the forest through her roots and branches, but tries to escape from her fate. You can click on the image to view it in full size.

I made this controller to improve my hard surface modeling skills and to show my love for old consoles. The base model was done in Modo and the rendering in Maya with multiple displacement maps for all the details on the buttons.

These are ten seconds of traditional hand-drawn animation. The story is not very original, but I hope it is true to many of Disney’s classic animation principles. It was drawn entirely in Photoshop and took me about 10 hours to complete, although I did not draw all in-betweens and reused some frames.

This zombie chicken will be an enemy in a first-person shooter, which some of my fellow students are creating. Although I am not part of this project I made this character as a sculpting exercise. They won’t be done until January, so I do have some time left to rig and animate it.

The base model was done in Modo, because it allows fast modeling, and was then exported to and sculpted in ZBrush. I did some basic painting in ZBrush, but all the details, like the blood splatters, were painted in Modo. It weighs about 2600 triangles and has three 2048×2048 Textures for color, specular and normals.

This is a WIP from a character for a short film project, which was unfortunately cancelled. We wanted to make an Indiana Jones parody with cartoonish characters, so they were heavily inspired by those films. The head is how far I came during Pre-Production, maybe I will reuse the mesh another time. But it was a great modeling exercise.

This character took me about two months to complete and went through several design changes. Our instructor wanted us to make a character with a mechanical add-on, so I decided to make wooden steampunk wings.

The model weighs 8018 triangles with the wings and accessoires. There is one 1024×1024 pixel texture map for the body and another one for the wings, everything was painted with a mouse, as I still had not bought a tablet! The character is also rigged for posing.

This is a low-poly model for real-time purposes. It was used for an interactive learning software, in which the user has the ability to explore Tutanchamun’s grave in the Valley of the Kings. The main difficulty were the shrines and sarcophagus that are wrapped around the mummy like onion skin.

These three animations have been developed during animation class at my university. The creature model and rig were made by Billy Butler and Kurt & Oyvind, the character in the second video is the famous LowMan by Miguel González Viñé and the last video is a motion design representing the various parts of my studies.

I did the animation and rendering, as well as modeling, texturing and rigging of the bunny character and compositing and color correction in After Effects. At first I tried to create a working and flexible ragdoll rig for the bunny, but it always ended up in infinite chaos and so I created a simple, traditional rig.

I did this as a shading and lighting exercise for university. The assignment was to model a NURBS-model of an ancient greek vase and design a texture for it. I than had to set lights and render it in three variations – on a white background, a black background and one free version. A detailed documentation (Vase_Tutorial.pdf, 950 KB) of the process was also mandatory.

This is a vector graphic of a Ducati 848 motorcycle, done as an university project in spring 2008. Took me about two weeks and approximately 30 hours to complete. The assignment stated to only use Illustrator paths to draw an object. Most areas are paths with single colors, only the front and back tire have gradients and parts of the cooling unit in the front are gradient meshes.

Unfortunately we only did the pre-production for this project. It was planned as an anti-smoking-clip, featuring a society of microscopic terrestrial and incredibly cute creatures, which would have been made extinct by the tip of one single cigarette at the end of the clip.

Nonetheless I learned a lot of technical tricks in Maya during the process. The cigarette model consists only of procedural textures, the tear strand rig was planned for usage as slime of the dead creatures and the burning paper would have been used in the ending credits.

These low-poly models were created during the work on our thesis at the Höhere Technische Bundeslehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen in Innsbruck, Austria from summer 2005 to spring 2007. It was a real-time strategy game done from scratch with C++, OpenGL, Maya, Photoshop and in a team of four people.

The original thesis is available for download, it features descriptions of all the technical aspects and research as well as a complete list and details of the models: Augustus_Diplomarbeit_Small.pdf (10.7 MB, 234 pages)