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.