Mudboxing - Keepin' Face!

The mudboxing continues, this time I tried my hand at a head and just went from there, it didn't turn out the best.

I initially started with a sphere, shaped it into a head and thought I'd mark out where the eyes nose and mouth would go, although I quickly realised I didn't have the geometry I needed to make the nose without subdividing it loads.

So I began again, only this time with the base head from mudbox and worked from there, those results weren't the best either. So once again I found myself heading over to youtube to find some tutorials.

I didn't find a tutorial as such but rather a guy going through his process of mudboxing a face and explaining the anatomy behind the face such as bones and muscles and how they shape the face which I found to be a great help.

Eyes = Winging it                                                                       Nose down = Tutorial

Ears are quite hard

The final head looked ok I thought, with the exception of the weirdly high up eyes and thought that I had done a good enough job with the muscles and bones etc. However after leaving it for an hour and coming back to it I think I should've exaggerated the features a little bit more, especially if the head was part of a much larger body.

After going back and lowering the eyes however the head did look a good bit better. Although wow those ears look horrific!  Still good practice I guess.

Mudboxing - T Rex

Been doing some mudboxing, just followed a tutorial series up on YouTube which was very good in getting the hang of the basics and it goes over all the sculpting tools, creating vector displacement maps, and painting.

The eyes turned out way more emotional than I had planned, hence the silly caption

I find mudbox to be hugely fun to work with, much more enjoyable than modeling withing 3DS Max, although you definitely have a lot more control within 3DS Max, and (correct me if I'm wrong) but you can't create new geometry, and so mudbox really does seem to be a tool for creating extra detail to an already made model. Although, I'd be very happy to work solely in mudbox if it was possible, it's very quick and very fun.

Again after painting the eyes still did not look very fierce

 The painting with mudbox is also very good, it has the main functions found within photoshop such as layers, masking, brush size and opacity changes. Reminded me a lot of painting my old 40k models back in the day.

difference between not using normal maps and using normal maps

Pose tools in mudbox are quite easy to use which is nice, although better poses can be achieved with a skeleton

The tutorial series then ended with a look at the pose tool, which can be quickly used to pose whatever it is you just created, it works very well and it's quite easy to use. Although rigging a mesh with a skeleton can get you much much greater results.

RTS Project Over

Well I'm sad to say that I was fired, or as I'd like to call it "let go". No I was fired,  head of the project wanted the game released as soon as possible and I simply wasn't able to texture quick enough for him as it really isn't my strongest area.

I remained professional of course and wished him luck with his project, no hard feelings and all that, and I won't be mentioning him at all by name.

Although I can't help but feel treated a tad unfairly. Hear me out now, don't get me wrong, I'm still a student, and I still have lots to learn and there's plenty of people out there who are better than me at what I do, and so it's completely understandable that I was replaced.

However I disliked the way in which I was fired, messaged on steam, saying yeah sorry but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to let you go. No verbal warnings, no "hey can you try and pick up the pace?", just boop, gone mate. Gone.

Still I remained friendly about it all, said hey, well I worked on this model for you for 10 hours yesterday, you might as well have it, yknow? This was the Town Centre model I did earlier. To which he responded, "no the other guy's already done that". So he's had this guy working away from him, behind my back, and not letting me know, just happily letting me waste my time. Just a tad unpleasant, to know I just wasted a day.

Cheers mate.

Although I guess this does mean I can focus on other personal things and take some time to learn mudbox and get some practice with it.

I would like to end this post though stating that while the whole firing process could've been smoother, I do wish these guys all the best.

Town Centre

Next I then began work on the Town Centre, the building that would be placed on top of the "Unclaimed Settlement", which the player would then be able to use to start building a new settlement.

Comparison of the Town Centre and Unclaimed Settlement

Added Pillers and more geometry to stay in line with the Greek Architecture

Finished model of the Town Centre, unwrapped with labels on the unwrap

Some Food Stalls

I wanted the Town Centre to have a lot more detail than the Unclaimed Settlement with a water fountain, food stalls, barrels and a lot more decor around the buildings.

The model can be viewed in 3D here