Polycount’s Ryan Jackson talked recenty with Ryan Clark about the development of Crazybump, a tool most game artists now use in their regular arsenal of tools.

Ryan Jackson – Before we begin let me just say congratulations! Since Crazybump has been out of Beta it’s been quite the success! We’ve certainly seen a ton of posts about it on the Polycount Forum. How’s it been seeing an idea like this come to fruition?

Ryan Clark – Thanks very much! It’s been great seeing this little program take on a life of its own. It’s also been a bit surprising. I had hoped artists would find CrazyBump useful, but I was didn’t expect the wonderful reception the tool has found in the game-art community. (The first time I saw CrazyBump mentioned on someone’s resume, I was kinda shocked.)

Ryan Jackson – It really was awesome to see this application take off – especially from someone who was relatively unknown, yet so eager to make it as accessible & powerful as it can be. Why don’t you tell everyone a bit about yourself. What sort of technical background do you have?

Ryan Clark – I’ve been programming recreationally since I was small. I learned to code on Commodores and Apple IIs in the mid-eighties. I never really recovered. I picked up a master’s degree at some point, and then spent a few years working for game studios in Austin. I gravitated toward graphics, having identified the field for the giant playground that it is. I found I could entertain myself for hours by creating visualizations of random functions and ideas. That’s what eventually led to CrazyBump.

Ryan Jackson – It’s interesting what a long period of time can do to one’s imagination. Maybe thats why its Crazy (I had to). On that note, where did the idea for Crazybump come from?

Ryan Clark – A lot of it came from playing around. My workflow involves throwing half-baked formulas at a compiler or sheet of graph paper, to see what happens. Most of the time I don’t quite know what I’m doing. Occasionally I find an effect that looks cool and gets added to CrazyBump. I have to give a lot of credit to the artists who’ve contacted me with suggestions and feature requests. CrazyBump wouldn’t exist without a lot of helpful advice I’ve recieved from friends in the art community. The very first version of CrazyBump was born of necessity one weekend in 2003. I had written a parallax shader, but I didn’t have good heightmaps to test it with. I’m not much of a visual artist, so I wrote a program to generate some heightmaps. I gave it the imaginative title “Displacement Creator,” and I posted it on polycount. It was was a simple program. In retrospect, its best feature was that it displayed my email address whenever you used it. So artists began to send me suggestions for features they’d like to see. I tried to implement things people were asking for. In summary, CrazyBump is a frankensteinian conglomeration of happy accidents and artist’s sugestions.

Read on to Page 2 and find out what Ryan has to say about what Crazybump brings to the table, what the community is asking for now, major obstacles he faced when developing Crazybump and more!