Textured Rodent

Here is a quick update on my rodent project.  It has been textured and shaded.  I mainly used Photoshop for texturing and bodypaint3d for painting over any seems.  I used Maya’s Skin shader to get a realistic subserface skin look to it.  I am pretty happy with it at the moment, I think with proper lighting in a scene it will look 10 times better.  The next step now is to begin rigging it, which is going to be very tricky but I like a good challenge.

I used a 2K map for the body and tail, the ears used 1K maps because they are small and its silly to waste memory on something that isn’t very big on screen.  I also used both displacement and normal maps, it’s good to have both because on most models Its difficult to be able to subdivide a model enough times at render time without it eating up all the memory so I subdivide it a few times and add displacement, this gives it enough detail for a fairly good surface read and then I add the normal map to add the rest of the detail.

You can view a turntable movie of the finished rodent model with textures below:

Finished Hairless Rodent Sculpt

I finally finished the high resolution sculpt of my hairless rodent model.  It was a very tricky model to sculpt, skin wrinkles can be very difficult to make look good.  I did a lot of research in cloth folds to help me get an idea of how wrinkles and folds look and where they go.  Most of the time I spent on this model was refining techniques  for creating skin folds and wrinkles.  I think I’ll make a tutorial on skin fold and wrinkle sculpting techniques in the near future.  It has been the most difficult thing to sculpt so far using mudbox and I’m quite happy with how it turned out though I think it could do with some major improvements in certain areas but I want to move on and begin texturing, shading, rigging it etc.

Turntable Movie

The final high resolution model has just over 10 million polygons. the next step for this is to extract normal and displacement maps, then get on with creating textures and shaders.

“Worm fish”

“Worm fish” is a concept sculpt that I did so I could refine my digital sculpting techniques. I haven’t had the opportunity to really see how far I could go with high resolution sculpting applications such as mudbox so I decided to throw myself in at the deep end and see what I could do if I began with the simplest of base meshes.

I have seen a lot of demonstrations on the Internet where someone takes something as simple as a cube and turns it into a monster or a highly detailed human head etc, I decided to try it myself and see if I could make something good.

After a short time of using mudbox’s “grab” tool to block out the basic shape I then subdivided it and began making the tale thinner towards the end and make a hole where the mouth was to be. From their on I sculpted the rest of the forms that made up the main body shape, as I subdivided the model more and more I used a smaller brush size and started sculpting the smaller details such as wrinkles and the protruding vertebrae. Once I had got the model to its final stages I exported the lowest level back to maya so I could give it a basic pose. I then exported that mesh back into mudbox as a layer effectively creating a blendshape in mudbox. That layer was then flattened like when using photoshop’s layers and I adjusted the mesh according to its new pose. This included adding bigger wrinkles and bulging the muscles around areas where there were bends.

The mouth was by far the most complicated area to sculpt, There level of detail in the mouth required the model to be subdivided to a very high level. The final polygon count was just over 19 million polygons, this meant the mudbox file was around 2gb is size. I wanted to take advantage of zbrush’s turntable rendering tools and its matcap materials to bring out all of its details but Zbrush was unable to import a model with so many polygons in a single mesh. I needed to cut the model up into 5 parts, each with about 3.8 million polygons and then import them as subtools.

For a turntable render, click here

“Wrinkle Head”

This is a small task I set myself so I can learn more digital sculpting techniques. The design is of something I found on the website of Carlos Huante, who is an amazing concept artist for the film industry. The particular design I’m working from is good because there is alot of cool details like wrinkles and muscle creases etc and I got to experiment with ways of detailing teeth and gums.

Turntable Movie

Even though it was sculpted in Mudbox I found that for presentation purposes it was better to import the model into Zbrush to render turntables and take screen shots. Zbrush’s “matcap” materials are good for showing off the details while also having the model antialiased.

The Basemesh was modelled in Maya and the UV’s were unwrapped in UVlayout and Maya. Because the poly count is low and the topology is very simple the UV’s were unwrapped without much trouble at all.

It’s very important when you are creating a base mesh for high resolution sculpting, that the polygons are equally distributed all over the model. Otherwise when the model is subdivided there will be areas that have a very dense distribution of polygons and other areas that arent getting enough polygons.

This is bad because it means more subdividing is needed in order to get enough detail in all areas of the model, which means the polygon count and file size sky rocket very quickly and it becomes difficult to manage.

Old work from early 2008

I thought I might aswell post up some of my old work from my old site.

This is a character model that I made for my First showreel.  If you are familiar with the “metal gear solid” video game series you might recognise him as “Revolver Ocelot”.  Everything was modelled in maya and tweaked in zbrush.  For reference used google and 3d.sk to get a good idea of cloth folds and generally how clothing looks when its on a person.  I also bought a small Action figure of The character and used that for reference too.  Its alot easier when you have something infront of you to model from, this is because you can see it in three dimensions and see it from every angle.

When I modelled the gun for this character It took me about a week because I couldnt find enough reference pictures of a Colt Single action army from all angles.  I like to try and make my models as accurate as possible and not having enough pictures from all angles slowed me down.  I think I did a good job of making it, Hard surface modelling is not has difficult as organic modelling but good topology and an economic use of polygons is still very important.

Here is another piece from my old showreel.  The main inspiration came from the clown from the “spawn” comics.  I quite enjoyed the challenge of modelling someone overweight.  I created a very basic basemesh in maya and then did all the detailing in Zbrush.  I wasn’t very experienced with Zbrush at the time so I found it tricky to create certain shapes and I had to discover techniques on making certain details.  as I look back at it now I think of it as a good attempt of what I was trying to convey but it doesn’t really jump off the page as being anything special.

This was one of the first head models that I made in mudbox.  I used the same basemesh for this head that was used for my “Revolver Ocelot” model.  It took me about 12 hours over a few days to finish.  It took me so long because I still wasn’t very experienced with digital sculpting applications like mudbox and zbrush.

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