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.