Artist Guide to Mudbox 2012

Hello everyone,

I have undertaken yet another tutorial series.  Time to make a T-Rex!
First I added a little detail.

Then I made some wings in Maya.

When I was painting the T-Rex the wings were being painted funny, so I had to get rid of them for now.  (Interesting idea though)

Then I added lights.

Then I messed around with planes, paint, stencils, the sculpting tool, and the viewport filters.  It was a fun tutorial to mess with.

Final Project: Modeling a Toy

Hello again everyone,

For our last project in 3D Modeling 1 we will be modeling a toy.  I am going to see if my teacher will let me model one of these:

If not these I guess I will model this, it was on the list of choices for things to model on Photobucket: (I am not sure how you could play with it though)

Yay!  I got permission to model the knight!  My plan is to block out the model in Maya and then add in all the detail and color in Mudbox.  Here is what I have done so far in the past 7 hours.  =]

I modeled a medieval coat,

chain mail pieces,

two belts,

the knight's armor pieces,

the knight's weapons,

and the rock that he is standing on.

Here is what they look like together.

The next step is to take my model and export it from Maya to Mudbox and get down to the finer details.

Well I took the knight's coat into mudbox and started sculpting it, I worked for about 3 and a half hours on it and it was looking good.

I then discovered that there were trumpets protruding out of the coat arms!!?

I tried to see if I could delete it by selecting faces, however, I didn't succeed.  Does this mean that I will have to go back to Maya, delete some faulty geometry, and start sculpting all over again?

Okay, I got rid of the trumpets by exporting it back into Maya and then deleting them.  I then started sculpting again.  Mudbox is a cool program, but the computers kept crashing on me and telling me I didn't have enough ram.  However, sometimes by continuing to model even though the computer messes up a lot, you can press on and finish a project.  Here's what I was able to do (with the exception of the upper human torso.  I found a body model in Mudbox and exported it into Maya.  I then deleted all of the body besides the chest and arms so that I could rig the arms in the coat).

2 minutes into painting and I got a message that popped up everytime I tried to paint any object.  "Not enough memory to continue operation."  Also it only could paint part of my objects.  =[

Then I tried to save it to another file so that I could try painting on another computer.  It saved the file, suddenly painted all my objects black, and started doing this:

Then the file got corrupted and I couldn't open it anymore.  Therefore I will try to move onto one of my earlier saved files.

Because I was not able to paint some of the UV's on the model, I decided to paint using PTEX, however, the computer didn't have enough memory for that either.

I got on another computer to try and get everything working.  When I started everything up things were looking pretty good at first.  I was able to use the PTEX on the Coat and all my objects were painted black.  Then as I was just about finished painting the coat I got another error about not having enough memory.  Right after that the computer told me that an error occured and the whole program crashed.

It is 3:30 am and I have 4 finals tomorrow, two of which I haven't really gotten to study for yet.  I thought I should finish this first.  I'll try another computer.

Well it has been about a half hour and I have tried another computer.  This time it crashed when I just started the PTEX setup.  I tried to start the program again to see if putting a lower number of texels for the PTEX painting would allow me to continue.  I set the settings from 2 million texels to 600,000 texels.  The new computer also shut Mudbox down even with lower settings for the memories sake.

I'll try another computer.

Julie finished her project and let me use her computer and it worked finally!  After spending hours trying different computer I finally got one that work.  However I ran out of time and I needed to study for a final at 6 in the morning haha.  Luckily I got a 98.  This is what I was able to do.  I spent about 21 hours on it.

Introduction to Mudbox 2012

The tutorial gives you the basic smoothed mesh and it is your job to use the tools of Mudbox to give the dragonfly detail.  I am almost through the course.  I have still have been having troubles with Mudbox crashing and sometimes I am not able to get things exactly the way the instructor wants.  Here is what I have so far.

I cut into the soft mesh to make the dragonfly look like it had it's insect shell,  I also used the sculpt tool to add detail to the mesh,

added some spiky hairs to the body,

added lighting to the scene,

painted a base color,

and then I painted a second layer of color.

This next part took a long time.  I probably spent about 8 hours just working on the last few videos.  I had to get on 3 different computers and Mudbox kept crashing over and over again.  I also lost some of my data and had to redo parts because files got corrupted.

I was finally able to finish to the best of my abilities and create this:

In the end I wasn't able to put the hexagonal pattern over the eyes because the Window's side didn't have Photoshop and then when I switched to the Mac side to try and put the pattern on it wouldn't let me export it to Photoshop.  I'm glad I am finished, but maybe I can get someone to help me find a way to put the pattern on the eyes.