I had a bit of a break from this one I started a while back (a redo of a model done for the game salvation prophecy….so the base is glen southerns.) I wanted to do  a’proper’ version of it so changed a few things and made it my own in many ways, although obviously big props still go to my mate Glen for the main idea.   Sculpted in mudbox and renderd in 3d max with 2 portal lights

Well I’d like to wish a hapy new year to you all.  I’m sure many of you have had some well needed time off from work and took it easy over teh holidays. Alas I was busy and worked over xmas on a important model for a client.  So apart from the daytime on xmas day itself I worked completely though it.  It might sounds rather scrooge like, but sometimes you have to pull hours and working times that are beyond normal.

So after a couple of weeks of working on ‘non monsters’ I was itching to get back to a big scay monster for some personal time.  But you should know me well enough by now that I can’t go too long without a few monsters lol.  I just started this one tonight from an old base mesh I had lying around.  Its stil very much early days as a work in progress and I’m usure whether to keep these proportions or not at this stage.

I hope you all had a wonderful time over xmas and new yer, but I have to admit I find it god to get back to normal.

I’d like to wish all the readers of DashDotSlash a very merry xmas and hope you all have a fantastic new yer.

Wayne…

Part 6 - Hard Surface texturing  (41mins)

Here is it, the last part of Wave one of the Mudbox 2009: ‘Ftrom The Ground Up’ series that is a 41 min hard surface texturing video tutorial in Mudbox 2009.  Wave 2 should be starting in a day or three.   All hasn’t been sweetness and light in Wayne Towers though…

It’s been a helluva week and looks like someone has taken a very serious exception to the ‘Ground Up’ series and the QuickStart one.   In the last 2 week I’ve had 2 attacks with drive killer taking out over 4 terrabyte of drives (and turning them into paperweights…along with the last year of work) and tonight at 7.27pm GMT my paypal account hacked…. is that going to stop the series?  No chance ;)  I don’t give in to bullies.  So I’ve lost a year worth of models and contacts….but models I can easily make again..and contacts know me well enough to know where to find me.

What I’m most angry about was a model I was never going to share, that was a cartoon character in the Aardman animation style I did for my son.  The beauty of working as fast is that its  no biggy to redo stuff in a night or three.  But that model was special so I’m livid that my son was left disapointed.

If anything it just makes me even more detirmed to keep this running as long as I can… I’m notoriously pig headed and no way will I let something like this stop these videos from being released…   So its safe to say that I’m rattling more than  a few cages with people that would rather that these high resolution free tutorials weren’t out there or made available for free.  I vowed to keep this revolution roling as far as I could and I will, no matter what.  Plus contingency plans were made a while back.

Wayne…
PS in case anyone thinks I’m being an attention seeking loonatic I have proof of the above happening and have passed it on to Dave Cardwell at Autodesk in case anyone accuses me of being some idiot making it all up…I know I’d have trouble beliving it if I read someone posting this….

This started as a doodle that I ended up taking a bit further tonight.  Its a viewport render from Mudbox 2009 and is of a 300, thousand poly sculpt (just because you can use lots of polys, doesn’t nean you must!) Maps: 2k bump, diffuse and specular

Video Download link

This quick start video is rather topical this time.   I thought I’d cover getting your mudbox 2009 32 bit displacement maps working well inside of XSI.  It shows how to get the best quality out of your map in (hopefully) an easy to replicate way.  For this tutorial I’m only using a 2k displacement map that was exported as a OpenEXR file from mudbox.  This time its recorded at 800×600 res and encoded as an AVI so that its easier to see what I’m doing, although everything is explained anyway.

I may consider this one done now…we’ll wait 24 hours and see how I feel.  Render is 3d max using mental ray.

This is somethig I started last night as a mess around….he’s got rather a complex back story as sort of a cautionary tale about dangers of genetic manipulation and stem cell reasearch. (Although you dont relay give a buggery about that right?) The idea behind it is this freak of science although quite scary is ‘flawed’ (he’s too weak to pull his huge weight along easily) and due to sicko’s like myself getting a hold of the ability to play god with DNA and stem cells….   Yeah a bit of a heavy concept for me I know!

Also today we went for our 20 week scan on the baby and now know its going to be a girl…  We’d given up hope of ever having one as the majority of kids in both lines are males.. So we’re both over the moon…and kane….well…he’s already been out buying clothes for his little sister to be.

This is a screenshot I thought Id try and experiemnt on..so I took it into combustion (an app I’ve only ever used once before in my life) and did a bit of messing around purely by eye.  It shows that a simple real time render in Mudbox 2009 is truley a thing to scare the crap out of you. :)  I was thinking of taking this to a full render, but after seeing this (even at this unfinished stage) I’m thinking ‘do I actually need to?’  Judging by this I think I might be quite happy with mud screnshots stright into combustion with a little photoshop.

This is sort of a dry run of one of the main projects later in the ‘Mudbox 2009: From The Ground Up’ series. The model will of course be different…

Here’s something I’m messing around with at the moment as a personal project that will eventually be imported into the unreal 3 engine.  I’m using Mudbox 2009 for this one and I’ll upload a video showing a turnaround later.