I will be using a model with I have found, it is very simple and it will allow me to build up detail by sculpting rather than modelling in Maya.
Here is the model I will be using, as you can see it's very basic and it's not UVmapped. Something I will also have to learn.
When using the UV texture editor this is what came up for the body and as you can see it's pretty much useless unless I want it one solid colour all over. I needed to learn how to re map his character to be able to texture later.
/>Bellow is all the tools that I will have to use when re mapping this object, I found that you only have 3 or 4 main tool for the job, number one in the picture is the cut tool, and this tool is useful when I want to cut edges of one of the maps to stick to another. It's good to make separate things like hands from arms of head from body, areas where special detail will be needed. number two is the sew tool, this tool is used to stitch whatever needs stitching in the UV maps, for example, finding that a characters leg has been place into two sections, using this two I can make it into just one, it will also move it into place.
Number 3 is the unfold tool, this tool is useful when the UVs are too close together or are on top of each other. This tool is also very helpful when you have all the UVs selected and you want to neaten things up.
Another tool which I found myself using a lot was the To Shell tool, this allowed you to move whole areas, or shells e.g. the head across the grid without selecting other UVs from other maps. I also found that when I swathed on the borders I was able to see where cutting had taken place.
When I got to grips with the whole task of UV mapping I had this as a result!
Now that at this point I had sorted out the UVs it was time to start to sculpt. From YouTube videos I noticed that when sculpting in mudbox you start off with a very low quality mesh, at this point its best to get the shape right before adding detail as detail will not show up. By pressing Shift and D the mesh smoothes itself out adding to the poly count and therefore allowing more out the geometry. I problem that I encountered during the sculpting progress was that I couldn't figure out how to lower the levels in the geometry, this was a simple Page Up or Page Down on the keyboard of a PC, I'm still trying to find out for Mac.
the whole idea of sculpting has really motivated me to do another things, from what I have found out mudbox allows you to very creative, it's also very easy to use and I could easily get a nice result in just a few hours.
After following a few tutorials I found myself being quite experimental with the tools, I also understood the idea of having mesh levels,
This is what I managed to do in mesh level one
At this stage adding detail is very pointless just because it's probably not even possible. I would need more polygons to play with.
This was one of the tutorials that really help me understand how things worked in Maya, the guy in the video makes it very clear of how to use the tools
I found that it's very simple to get detail in, in the lower levels of geometry you add the shapes, and then in the higher levels you add the details. after a few hours of playing around and making a few mistakes I got to this stage on the image bellow, as you can see its looking a lot more like a character than just polygons. I have also added some eyes, there were just simple spheres colours in white. I believe this was at level 4 of geometry.
The next level below is level 5, as you can see I was able to add more detail and start to give some personality to the model, I have added wrinkles and I have made the ears point up again.
All I did in this level was add more detail, that how easy things work in mudbox, I find it much easier than zBrush. In level 6 I have started to use stencils, these allow you to add skin like texture to your models, it's a very fast way to add detail as all you do it paint it on.
after being quite pleased with the detail I had made I started to look into layers, layers are good for making clothing in mudbox, to be honest I didn't find it every good in terms of detail. All I did was flood the mesh with a larger copy of itself and then just take away to leave behind a very poor clothe like shape.
This is what I mean.
As you can see above, the mesh has got fatter.
When I used the mask tool is allowed me to take away from the new mesh exposing the old one under it, I could also lower the opacity to make the fatter mesh thinner. At this level of fatness it wasn't very good to sculpt with.
Here is an image of how the opacity changes the mesh, as you can see on the right the opacity is now at 30 and not 100 like before. You can really tell the difference when looking closely at the neck area.
After adding another layer to the first one I did I managed to get a tight clothing effect, I was blown away by the outcome but I guess that's as good as I can do for now.
My next bit would be to add colour to my model, I found a tutorial in YouTube which showed me how to do it, and I found that the tutorial was quite complicated but I managed to work from it and only really concentrating on the main parts.
After a while of practicing with paints I managed to give the character a greeny gray texture, I also added a porcelain material to the eyes and then painted the pupil on. This all was a lot simpler than it looks.
Here is what I managed to do using the paint tools and layers in mudbox.
Here is what it looks like on the UV map, as you can see the pain is where is should be in the model, I have learnt that with mudbox I can texture anything I want as long as I have UV mapped the object. I plan to do this in the future to get a better result when it comes to working on my other films.
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