Day 200

I apologize ahead of time but this is going to be another technical post. So I've been using Mudbox 2010 and recently got 2011 to work but neither allow me to paint because my graphics card isn't good enough. My brother has a laptop with a dedicated graphics card but it's broken but should be fixable. It's a common problem with the laptop he bought. There's something wrong with the soldering inside and cracks form in it. A method to fix it is to overheat the components to melt the solder and reestablish a good connection. So I taped over all the vents, wrapped the laptop in blankets and turned it on to let the heat build up. Eventually the laptop shut itself down and after letting it cool, I turned it on everything seemed to be working.

I got ready to install programs when I realized this computer had the 32 bit version of Windows while I had 64. So I had to find and download 32 bit versions of all the programs first. Finally I installed Mudbox 2013 and it looked like it was working correctly and I could finally paint. Then I installed the drivers for the tablet and opened up Mudbox again and that's when the laptop froze. I restarted and Windows wasn't loading up correctly. At this point, I wasn't sure if it was drivers I just installed or the original problem with the laptop was just happening again. I spent awhile trying to fix it on my own but eventually my brother came home and told me that what was happening had happened before. So I put the tape and blankets back on and heated it again but I kept turning it on when it was shut itself off. After a cool down, the computer was working again. I think the second heating worked better but I just have to be careful about the laptop overheating again. Ironically heat both fixes and breaks the laptop. I opened up Mudbox but found my tablet wasn't working 100%. I had to double tap things when I should have just needed to tap once. This problem didn't seem to happen in other programs. So I installed Mudbox 2011, which is what my book is written for, and the tablet worked fine for that. Now I finally have a working computer with a working copy of Mudbox that works with a tablet. It just took a bit of time. Anyway, let's get back to the art stuff...

Day 199

So I bought a tablet. Not a portable computing device, but the input only device that digital artists tend to use. In the intro of my Mudbox book, the author recommended getting one and then pretty much said you can't produce good work with just a mouse. I was like, "Seriously? Is that a challenge?" Then when the book didn't respond, I figured I might as well get one if everyone else uses one. I don't want to show up at a future job and have them hand me a tablet and then have no idea how to work it. I don't think I'll be using it with Maya much but I can see how it'll be helpful with sculpting and painting in Mudbox. 

Tapping the surface with the pen tip is how I do the left mouse click and I can also drag from there. The pen has a two button rocker on it for the middle and right mouse buttons. I haven't found the best way to hold the pen while still being able to click those buttons easily but luckily I don't have to use them too often. The really weird thing for me though is just moving the cursor around. I have to hold the pen within a centimeter of the surface and move it around without touching to move the cursor without clicking anything. I find the lack of tactile feedback strange. So just for general input use, I'm slower using the tablet compared to a mouse or even a touchpad (though I can use the tablet without the pen as a touchpad). Another area of use is manipulating models in three dimensions (rotating around the camera, panning, zooming). To do this in Maya and Mudbox, I have to hold down the Alt key and then use one of the mouse buttons. For my mouse, I programmed one of the extra buttons near my thumb to be Alt so I can easily move the viewpoint around with one hand. I cannot do that with the tablet. The tablet does have four programmable buttons on the left so I can use one of those as Alt so I don't have to reach over to my keyboard. However I still have to use both hands which I don't like. 

The last area of use is sculpting and painting which is where the tablet should excel. Not only is the drawing motion more natural and accurate, the tablet also has pressure sensitivity so how hard I press the pen will influence how strongly my brush is affecting the model and/or how big my brush is. With a mouse, I would have to constantly adjust both the size and strength as I worked. I've yet to do any significant sculpting with the tablet (I made the girl with a mouse) so we'll see how that goes. 

If anyone is curious about the other programmable buttons, I made one do the Undo command. The next one is Ctrl. Normally the brush will pull the surface of the model outwards. If I hold down Ctrl, it'll push inward instead. Lastly, I have one button as "B" which allows me to change the size of the brush. I wasn't sure if I wanted the pressure sensitivity to control both size and strength so I added that in there just in case but that might change in the future.

Day 198

I wasn't too productive this week. However there have been some changes on a technological side. After sculpting that girl, I decided to look at what Mudbox has online similar to the online Maya lessons I went over awhile ago. Unfortunately, what I found was less like lessons and more like an instruction manual. While reading over that I came across different ways I can change how the model is rendered while I work. I've been working on Mudbox 2010 but I still have 2011 installed even though it isn't working properly. So I though maybe if I change some settings around, I could get 2011 to a working state. That didn't end up happening. However I did find out that if I take a file I saved in 2010 and opened it in 2011, the model rendered correctly and I could actually see what I was working on. So I was pretty happy since 2011 is the version I wanted to use. I still can't paint in either version but this was a step up. 2011 has a couple of new features compared to 2010. One big one is that it can generate videos. One kind is just a simple turn around shot of the model like the one below.

Much cooler though is that I can now record a time lapse video of what's on the screen while I'm working. To give an example of what that looks like, I just quickly messed around with the girl head I already made. Hopefully I'll do more of these since I think they're more interesting to see compared to a bunch of photos that don't actually show how I got from point A to point B. I just need to figure out the right settings because I could end up sculpting for hours at a time and don't want excessively long videos. I'm also switching over to embedding youtube videos because blogger can't handle whatever Mudbox is dishing out.

Day 194

Next I sculpted the ear which turned out pretty well. One thing about this book is that it goes over a lot of anatomy stuff. One of the authors is a real world sculptor turned digital sculptor so the book has a more artistic vibe compared to the more technical feel my other books have. After the ear, I made the hair to finish off the model. I didn't follow the book and just did my own thing for the hair. I pulled out the general shape of the hair and then drew in a bunch of fine strands of hair. 

The above left front view is a orthographic view which means there's no perspectiveness to it (the front is the same size as the back and not bigger like it would be in the real world) so it looks a little odd to me. On the right you can see the pony tail I kind of bulged out of the back of the head. Because I built this big ponytail out of this small area of the head, the density of polygons in the tail is less than the rest of the head which is why it's less detailed. I could have increased the number of polygons but that increases the file size a lot and the tail isn't that important. The egg that I made earlier had over a million polygons and ended up being a 200 megabyte file. I think this model has closer to 500,000 polygons.

There's really no great way to model the iris and pupils so they aren't the best. Overall it turned out ok. Not bad for the second thing I've ever modeled in Mudbox. It doesn't really look like the photos of the real girl but it does look like a girl so I consider that a success.

Day 193

Apparently after modeling a bell pepper, you're qualified to model a person. Here the goal is to model a young girl. Mudbox has some basic shapes to help you get started. One is of an adult head which I'll be using. I also imported some reference images.

First thing is to get the general shape right. Here I used the grab tool a lot. Instead of pushing in and out the surface of the model like a lot of the other tools, the grab tool lets me click on a point and then pull it in any direction I want. So to lower the ear, I just clicked on the lobe and pulled downwards. 

I switched the material of the model to this more matte white one. This is a tip that my other Mudbox book gave me. I allows me to see the surface more accurately as I'm working. It also means you all can see any inaccuracies as well. Along with the two reference sketches above, I was also given a bunch of photos of the real girl I'm supposed to be modeling from different angles. I put them on my phone so I could look at them easily while working. Hopefully, it won't have to explain why I have photos of a random little girl on my phone to anyone. Anyway, I used those photos to get the head shape to a more final state. Next I increased the number of polygons and created a new working layer for the nose (and one for all the future parts as well).

So I sculpted the nose followed by the mouth. On the left, you can see the top half of the head is missing. I can select different areas of the model and hide them. This is so I don't get distracted by other parts or it allows me to see what I'm working on better. It also gives my computer a break since it doesn't have to render those areas. Finally I moved onto the eye. I had some trouble smoothing out some parts of the eyelid. I forgot to mention that I have reflection turned on for all of the tools. So whatever I do on one side of the face gets mirrored on the other side. 

Day 192

I decided to switch books yet again since I can't paint in Mudbox. This book is still focused on Mudbox, however the first few chapters deal just with sculpting so I don't have to worry about painting for awhile. The first lesson was on making a bell pepper. I started out with a sphere and flattened the top and bottom. Then I pushed in some guide lines to help me get the general shape.

With all the pushing and pulling, the model tends to get a little lumpy. Luckily there's a smoothing tool to help with that. After getting the final shape, I moved onto the stem. I used another tool called the freezing tool. This allows me to paint areas blue which indicate areas that I don't want changed so I can focus on the stem without worrying about accidentally changing the pepper.

After making the stem, I had to give a slight texture to the pepper so it isn't perfectly smooth. I did this using a stencil you can see on the right. There are a variety of stencils in Mudbox and they appear as a flat image in the work area in front of the model. Now when I push and pull, it will mimic the stencil's pattern. Below I have the final pepper.

Day 191

My book started with creating an egg which doesn't sound that exciting or difficult. However this lesson was designed to show all the features that Mudbox has so I get an overview of the program. Looking at the reference photo on the top right, you can see that the egg isn't perfectly smooth so there is some work to be done to mimic that.

I start out with a simple sphere and then I uploaded some reference images. I probably didn't need to place references to create an egg shape but they wanted me to see how to import images for future projects. I also changed the material of the model from the default brown to white to allow me to see things a little bit more clearly. 

So to get fine detail in the model, I need more polygons. Much much more. In Mudbox, you can easily increase the amount of polygons. Each increase creates sort of a new level of detail to work on and I can switch between the levels depending if I was to do fine detail or general shaping. The sphere started out with about a thousand polygons. Here, I cranked that all the way up to over a million.

Now with that set, I can finally get to work. I said Mudbox is a sculpting tool so how it works is that the black circle represents my brush and I can push or pull the surface of the model. However it's not limited to just a circle. There are a variety of brushes (called stamps in Mudbox) so the one I'm using here is a cluster of dots. So I pushed and pulled the dots all over the egg to create random bumps and depressions. It's not looking too much like an egg though. Another feature of Mudbox is that you can work in layers. So one layer can just be the basic shape of your model and another can be the fine details. This way you can work on certain parts of the model without interfering other parts. If you change your mind, you can also throw away a layer and still keep all the stuff you've already done. You can also control how strong a layer affects the model so I toned down all the dots I made to produce a much more subtle and accurate eggshell surface below. 

At this point, I was going to paint the egg. Along with sculpting, Mudbox is a painting tool and it allows me to paint directly onto the model. I can also sculpt and paint in Maya but the tool set is not as powerful. Being able to paint directly on the model is much easier than having to paint in Photoshop on a flat image and hoping it looks right when I put it on the model. Mudbox allows you to both sculpt and paint in layers so painting in Mudbox is very similar to painting in Photoshop. However, this was when I encountered the big issue I mentioned earlier. Painting in Mudbox 2010 on my computer just doesn't work. Considering how important painting is in Mudbox, I was pretty disappointed. I tried installing Mudbox 2009 but painting didn't work in that either so I've hit a roadblock. My brother has a laptop with a better graphics card that's broken but apparently fixable. I'm going to try to see if I can get that working and hopefully Mudbox with work on that.