Day 189

To recap, I'm in the middle of my fifth Maya book but I've reached a section that I didn't find too exciting. So I decided to take a little detour into another program called Mudbox. While Maya is very broad and deep in what it can do, Mudbox is has a much more narrow focus. It's primarily a sculpting and painting tool and it's more artistic and intuitive to use. A real life sculptor would probably very easily pick up how to use this program. Mudbox and Maya can import and export files between each other. So I can start a model in Maya, fine tune it in Mudbox and then send it back to Maya. The beauty of Mudbox is that I can create very realistic models and create them much more quickly than I would in Maya.

But first things first, I had to get the program working. My laptop doesn't have a great graphics card. Ideally I would like to buy a more powerful laptop or desktop but those things cost money which I do not have an abundance of (I also can't upgrade my current card either). Since Maya works fine on my laptop, I assumed Mudbox would too but I was wrong. I installed the 2013 version and when I started the program, a message box popped up saying I have the wrong graphics card and then closed the program. It didn't even give the program a chance to load. Maybe it would have run sluggishly but at least give me that option. I looked into this and tried to see if there was a way around this to no avail. So then I installed the 2012 version and the same thing happened. Next, I installed 2011. This time the warning message popped up but allowed the program to load. I was happy until I saw a model on the screen or the lack there of. I could see the wireframe of the model but I couldn't see any of the surface shading (ie. the colored faces). I could manipulate and sculpt the model but without being able to see the surface, it was pretty much pointless. So I moved onto 2010 and finally things were working correctly. I eventually came across a big issue but I'll talk about that when it happens. I pretty much spent a whole day on just getting the program to run. After settling on 2010, I still spent awhile trying to get 2011 to work since that version has some cool features I wanted to utilize. Anyway, onto some actual work...