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

Wayne…

Sculpting Ears the Simple Way Video Link

Mudbox 2009 vimeo Group

One of the areas that beginners seem to have the most trouble learning to sculpt is the human ear.  So in this video I outline a very simple way to get your forms ready to take to the next level.  To clarify thing, this video  shows how to get from a flat plane to the major forms and is not intended as a highly detailed sculpt.  My hope is that by concentrating on the simple shapes it will make sculpting ears easier for those who have trouble with them.   Once you get to the stage shown in the video it is them far simplier to take things to a final result.

These ‘Simple Way’ videos are part of what will be an irregular series recorded as I have time concentrating on areas that people have trouble with when starting out.

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….

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In this video in the QuickStart series we cover how to use Mudbox’s 32 bit Painting ability to combine 2 32bit displacement maps. This is useful for times when you have an art director who likes the details from 2 different version of a sculpt and allows you to combine details quickly and with ease. (Incidentally you could also use similar workflow for correcting 32 bit maps by turning lights into flat mode and sampling the pixels you wish to use to paint. )

Mudbox 2009 Quick Start Series: Capturing max light rigs for use in Mudbox

Today bring a new vido in the quickstart series that outlines how to capture your lighting rig from 3d max and create a high dynamic range image that can then be used in mudbox for image based lighting.   In this way you can get some great lighting effects.

Mudbox 2009 demo:  On target rendering

I’ve heard a lot of people declaring that mudboxes ‘on  target’ abilities are nothing more than a pipe dream and are useless in production as it ‘can’t possibly replicate’ a full render.  Just to prove how much horse crap actually does come out of some people on forums these days (joke) I recorded this that shows a model matching the eventual target in max. The max render used mental ray final gather and a pretty complex set up.. Mudbox matched to about 99%  and was in real time.

So yes, it is possible providing you read the manual…if anyone says to you mudbox can’t do it…just tell them I told you they are wrong….very wrong….

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.

QuickStart Videos Part 1

QuickStart Videos Part 2

CGarena have now uploaded the 2nd sectoin of the QuickStart videos.  My thanks go out to Ashley over there at CGArena for helping to take the load of the bandwidth for DashDotSlash (which has now exceeded 1/2 terrabyte on these videos in less than 2 weeks!)  There are more to come.

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…