Day 267

So with Blastoise done, that means I'm also done with my Pokemon project. The goal was to make them with increasing amounts of polygons. Squirtle has about 300 polygons, Wartortle has 27,000 and Blastoise has around 10 million. Blastoise could definitely have less polygons if I used a bump map for the fine details instead of sculpting them but that would have defeated the purpose of the project.

Day 266

I've done my usual five posts per week so here are some bonus ones. For painting the colors, I was just working with three layers. You can see each by themselves above. On the left, I have the bottom layer with the orange and yellow. I put both on one layer since they are separated by the white trim so I don't have to worry about them touching each other. If they were, editing one might negatively impact the other. In the middle, we have the layer for the blue skin. There're also the lines on the shell which will sit on top of the base orange. On the right is the topmost layer which is mostly the yellow detail work which appears on top of the blue skin. There's also the white lines on the back shell but you can't see them here.

Here's an image so you can see the base layer of blue and all the yellow details I painted on top of it. Below you have the flat unfolded color map. Back and front shell on the bottom, upside down head on top left, tail on mid left, legs on upper right, arms in the middle and feet next to the arms.

Day 265

Here is the final product. I added in a shiny layer to go along with the painted layers. You can, of course, see that in the eyes but there are also lines of shininess on the back and front shell and then a little bit of shine on the head and arms. I also changed the shell up a little since last time. For the creases between the plates, I was going to darken them. However for most sea turtles, the cracks are light/white so that's what I did here.

I wasn't sure what to color the water guns. Should I do yellow like the belly or orange like the back or both? Neither one looked right in my mind's eye. However, I couldn't leave it white since it was looking too bright. So I ended up painting them a very light yellow bone like color and left it at that. If you remember before, I had issues sculpting the hands and feet. Those same issues made painting those areas difficult too so I couldn't do too much work there.

Overall, it turned out better than I expected. I wasn't that happy with the model but after painting it, the colors hid imperfections that I saw. Things just look better in color. The funny thing is that I don't particularly like painting; I'm more into modelling. So when I started painting this, I had no idea what I was doing and thought I was in way over my head. But eventually, somehow, things just started working out.

Day 264

Back to pokemon. I last left the model maybe 95% complete. I still had to make the water guns. I thought about maybe making them a hollow horn but eventually settled on a tube made from four plates. As I was building it, the tube changed from a circular one to more rectangular. The end result is what you see above.

Then it was on to painting. The back shell is orange which fades to white as a homage to the original drawing. Then I drew in lighter and darker orange lines on each shell plate. I wasn't super happy with how that turned out. It looks ok from afar but not too great up close.

The belly is obviously yellow and the rest of the body is blue. Since I wanted this to look realistic, I had to make the color transition between different parts looks natural by fading into one another. Going from yellow to blue wasn't that bad but there were some areas that went from blue to white that didn't look right. So there I had to fade the blue to yellow and then to white. I used the yellow to emphasize larger creases on the arms, legs and neck. Then I colored in some of the fine gaps in between the scales. I was going to add in another  layer of lighter blue but I was happy with what I had and just stuck with painting yellow on top of one blue layer.

The head didn't have the big scale pattern sculpted in so I just did my own thing there with the yellow. I wasn't sure what to color the knobs on the top of the head. Other colors didn't look right so I stuck with yellow. At first the eyes were more normal looking but the white just stood out too much. So I made it grayer but that didn't look natural. Since sea turtle eyes are more or less all black, I just cranked up the darkness.

Day 263

So I'm jumping to the final product. I had never planned on painting this model. I was just going to apply a flat color to each part so there would be some differentiation between armor and mouse. This is what I did but with the mouse being completely white, I thought it wouldn't take that much effort to paint some of it. So the only parts I painted by hand where the pink areas on the mouse.

I definitely wanted the mouse to be white. When I imported the (by default) brown mouse from Mudbox into Maya, Maya changed it to white and I liked how that looked. Since the mouse was white, I made the armor be a darker gray instead of a more silvery color which might have made things appear washed out. The dark gray would also contrast with the silver needle and dime. I like the pop of color the ribbon has with the red. It wasn't until this point that I realized that the ribbon is like the thread on a needle.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the end result. I could have made the armor more flashy or fantastical but I didn't want to go overboard. Plus miniature blacksmiths can only do so much.

Day 262

Besides the fact that the knight is sitting on a mouse, there's nothing else to indicate that he's small so that's where the next two things come in. I wanted his sword/lance to be a needle and his shield to be a dime. I made these two objects in Maya and positioned them where I thought they should go. Then I sent everything over to Mudbox so I could move and adjust the arms so they're holding the two objects. Like I said before, Mudbox has some quick and easy tools that makes moving and posing things very easy. Next for the dime, I created a bump map and copied over a picture of a dime. I could have just painted a photo on but I wanted some depth. It looks more like an engraving than being really three dimensional but that's the best I could do unless I went in and adjusted everything by hand.

I also made a bump map for the areas of chain mail that show underneath the armor and applied a chain mail pattern.

Next I sent the shield, needle and just the hands back to Maya to make some more objects. I just sent the minimal amount of parts because Maya isn't as good at handling high polygon objects (although this model doesn't have that many, just trying to be efficient). So I made some arm loops for the shield and then a long ribbon thing for the needle. Then I sent those back to Mudbox and luckily the ribbon didn't overlap with the mouse.

Day 261

I finished doing the leg pieces on the knight. Next I went back to the mouse armor for some final adjustments. I added the horns on the head piece and changed the shape of the back plates. Then I added more detail to the saddle. I created some straps to wrap around the bottom of the mouse. Finally, I added rivets all over.

Then it was back to the knight. I also added rivets to where I thought was appropriate and fixed little things here and there. Next, I mirrored the half I was working on. Now that I could see both sides of the suit together, I made more adjustments as needed. So here, the suit is more or less complete.