Day 217

Now I'm going to take the model made in Maya and pose it before I start to really sculpt. Mudbox has a basic human body figure built in. However the book wanted to create a simpler version with less polygons because it's easier to pose. It's kind of like the wooden mannequins artists use. There are less moving parts you have to deal with. The model here is also fairly chunky but when I go to smooth everything, it'll shrink down. So below you'll find a video of me posing the model with a description of what's going on below.

So you'll see me creating joints to move parts. Some parts are easier than others. If you remember awhile back, I would often complain about working with skeletons in Maya and having to check each joint to make sure they bend the model correctly. I have to do the same thing here. If it wasn't bending right, I'd have to go back and change the weights of the joint (the green parts). Anytime you see me wiggling the cursor around, that's probably what I'm doing. You can see it took me a lot longer to get the second arm bent. One reason is that I forgot to move the pivot point of the joint up after I created it. Midway through the video, I increased the number of polygons so the model smooths out and looks more realistic. At this point, I start using some sculpting tools. Just the grab tool and the smoothing tool to move parts around and begin to create the shape I want for the body. I still used the posing tools every so often for large movements or to rotate something (which the grab tool can't do) The smoothing tool was very useful to turn the blocky hands into a more natural shape and to fix any problems the grabbing caused. Then I spent quite a bit of time getting the fingers in the right position.

Some parts still don't look quite right but that will get fixed when I actually start sculpting.