Day 236

Here's the final result. I'm pretty happy with it.

Thanks Shiu Pei.

Day 235

I used an image I already had to paint on the eyes quickly. I also added some pink along the edges. Next was the hair. I was a little worried about how I was going to do this. Luckily I found a good combination of stamps and settings that allowed me to easily do the job with much better results than I expected.

Lastly, I picked out a good skin tone and painted that all over while adding some pink highlights here and there.

Below you'll find the finished color map.

After coloring, I added in some bump maps. I just just used copies of the color map for the sweater and hair as a quick way to make the bump map. It's fairly subtle so I turned off the coloring so you can see what it actually looks like. I also added in a specular map make the shine of the eyes and highlights in the hair.

Day 234

Now let the painting begin. I started with his pants. I painted a white base layer with blue on top of it. Then I erased some blue to get the worn look on his knees and added in some dirt. I spent too much time on the pants though because when I was done, I zoomed out to see how it looked and realized he has tiny legs and they're barely noticeable. Oh well. I moved onto his shoes making sure to add dirt and scuffs to them.

I moved on to the slingshot. The rubber bands and pouch just had a single layer of color. The wood had a pale yellow base coat. Dark brown was placed over it and fine lines of yellow painted on top of that. Then the top ends were erased to reveal the yellow below.

The sweater was a little more tricky. I had a base layer of dark green and then used a sweater stencil to paint on the lighter green pattern. The hard part was that the sweater is wider on the bottom than the top. I could have made the treading get narrower as it went up but I thought that wouldn't look right. Instead the treading is the same size all over but that meant that there would be some visible seams where one painted section met another. I tried to minimize that in the front by painting a larger continuous portion there. You can still see the seams but I don't think it's that bad.

Day 233

With two Mudbox books completed, I wanted to do a side project. I wanted to take the character that Shiu Pei drew that I modeled awhile ago and color it using Mudbox. First, I had to take my original model and unfold it to create the map. This took longer than I expected. When I made him, I was just focused on the end result and didn't model him that efficiently since I wasn't expecting to work on him again. So I had go back into Maya and clean up the model as much as I could. Some parts of him had way more polygons than were needed, some surfaces were reversed, etc. After that, I imported him into the unfolding program that one my Mudbox books showed me how to use which you can see above.

The next part took awhile because I had to relearn how to use the program. While the program is really good, it's not super clear how everything works. There were a lot of hotkeys and such I had to look up. But eventually, I got the resulting map above after cutting up pieces and flattening them out.

With that done, I could finally import the model into Mudbox. The goal was to just paint him but since all the tools were right there, I decided to sculpt a little and make him look better. I gave him some knees. There were some gaps in his hair so it was easy to just use the grab tool to close those up. The shoes looked fine from the front but were actually fairly misshaped which you could see from different angles so I fixed that. I spent awhile on the face. His head was very cube shaped so I tried to round it out a little more. I adjusted his nose so it wasn't a flat blob and fixed up the mouth. While I was doing this, I didn't think I wasn't making that much of a change but when put side by side with the original, his face looks much better.

Day 230

Another filter Mudbox has is showing the normals of the model which can be used to make a normal map. Normals are the perpendicularness of a surface. Normal maps and bump maps are similar in that they give an illusion of three dimensionality. Bump maps simulate just depth (up and down) so they can be black and white images. Normal maps contain the three dimensional direction of how light bounces off the surface so they need to be color images to store more information. Above is the normal map of the rock I made earlier.

I can save the map and apply to a flat square and now it appears as if there is a three dimensional rock there. If I tilt the viewing angle (below), it changes how the light bounces off the surface as if a rock was really there. However if I keep tilting, you can see how the square was flat all along. In a way, normal maps are like holograms. Holograms change the way light bounces off of it when you look at it from different angles to create a three dimensional effect despite being a flat object.

With that, I'm done with this book. I went through it fairly quickly. They didn't make the most interesting blog posts though. I thought the book was just ok. I wasn't a fan of the format of having a bunch of small lessons. I did learn and do some new things but I'm not sure how much I would use that in the future. Anyway, I promise there are more interesting blog posts to come.

Day 229

Now I'm going to make a rock. Very interesting stuff. I took a sphere and roughed out a rock shape. I found a picture of a rock and used that to paint the colors onto my model. There are different kinds of maps I can make in Mudbox, some of which you've already seen like color map, specular (shininess) map and bump map. As a short cut, I can copy the color map and convert to different map. So the bump map creates the illusion of depth depending on the value of black to white. By duplicating the color map and assigning that to the bump map as well, all the dark areas appear to be recessed in the rock.

I can do the same for the specular map. Now all the white areas automatically appear more shiny than the dark areas which you can see on the right. On the left are just random dots of shininess I made to represent the crystalline structure of the rock. I can have multiple maps so both can be layered on top of each other.

Above I have the final rock. I sculpted in some more cracks and crevices to help hide some problems in the initial paint job where you could see some seams in between paint strokes.

Here I have a problem that can come up when using stencils. I want the word to appear on the sheet, however the sheet is crumpled so the word isn't going to come out correctly.

One thing I can do in Mudbox is flatten any 3-D model into its 2-D map and then paint directly on that. This is helpful to check if I missed painting any spots since some parts of the model could get blocked by other parts and when it's flat I can now see everything. It's also useful in this case. Here the sheet's map ends up being just a simple square. Now I can use the stencil to paint the word and when I unflatten the model, I get the result below.

Day 228

Instead of switching back to my other Mudbox book, I decided start on a third one. The main reason was that this new book was written for Mudbox 2013. The book I just finished was for 2010 and the other one for 2011 so I just wanted to see what 2013 had to offer (there aren't too many Mudbox books out there). This new book is a little different. Instead of long lessons, it basically has lots of tips and mini-lessons. There's not a lot of visually interesting things to show and some things I just read instead of following along. So I went through the book fairly quickly. Anyway, above is supposed to be a stone tile I made starting out with a basic cube and using just a single stamp to sculpt.

In case you forgot, stamps are sort of like the brush tip I can use to sculpt with. I then went over making some stamps in Photoshop. They just have to be black and white images where white indicates where to push down and black is where nothing happens. Along with just drawing one in Photoshop, I can make a stamp out of something I sculpted. For example if I needed to make a wall full of bullet holes, I can sculpt one hole, make a stamp out of it and then use the stamp to make a lot of copies. So on the left, I made a hole and on the right is a filter that Mudbox has that shows depth in black and white. I can export that image to Photoshop, invert the colors and import it back as a stamp.

Now I can use the new stamp to make copies of the hole. Below I spent some time tweaking the material of a model. I can adjust color, the reflected color, shininess, etc to make gold on the left and glass on the right.