Mud slinging

Hello again.

Time for more of that pixel action! Today, I am going to talk briefly about something we've just started learning in class, Mudbox. No, its not a sandbox filled with mud or anything like that (although that would be a fun thing to study in class).

Mudbox is a program made by Autodesk, the same people that make Maya, and it is designed to let you take a 3D model, and essentials paint textures in them. In fact, the technique is known as texture painting. Mudbox, isn't the only one that does it either, there is another program that is far more popular in the industry, but more expensive, called ZBrush. While they do have an entire class on ZBrush, I am currently learning Mudbox as in introduction to texture painting in my textures and shaders class, since it is easier to learn.

It reminds me a lot of subdivisions (subDs). They both work like polygons, have multiple levels of details that you can increase and decrease interactively, and automatically smooth the object. I have been wanting to get more practice and study on subdivisions, and this is a similar system that I think will be good practice. And this works similarly to ZBrush, so it should make it easier to transition between in the future.

So for now, I have been playing with the different things you can do, and boy is it cool and a ton of fun! You can literally paint a 3D face, or draw 3D scales on something, or etch in a scar on a character, or any number of textures. It is going to take some practice and playing around to figure out all of what I can do with this, so it will be a few days before I will show any WIP (work in progress) on this, but please look forward to it. I will not likely not be using a model I made, since I don't have the time to made a character stable for Mudbox, but I know how, so perhaps someday soon I will have my own characters finely detailed and awesome.

Keep pixellated!