Sera

Well I'm smack dab in the middle of finals, which is why I haven't updated in the last week.
However, I do have a lot of new stuff to show, and more coming soon.
So for now, since I am so busy, allow me to show a project I have been working on in a program called Mudbox.  This is like ZBrush, but easier to use.  This is not an in-depth look at either program, but it did help give an idea of how to do such a technique and where to go from here.
I decided to model a triceratops.  The original base model is one found in the Mudbox community, what I did was literally paint the 3D texture, color, specularity, and everything else, onto the model.  It is a technique called Texture Painting, and uses something called Displacement Maps, which I combined with Bump maps to create my image.
While I did bring this into Maya to render using Renderman, it wasn't as successful a transfer as I would have liked, so I am showing the mudbox file for now until i can get the renderman render to work properly.
I plan to go back and "dirty" it up a bit, and make more adjustments.
Enjoy!

And yes, this is based on the Triceratops in Jurassic Park.

And yes, I did name it "Sera" after the Triceratops in Land Before Time.

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!