Some work in progress shots of my creature, sculpted in mudbox so far.

Sounds like a fun day! no? So I decided to clean up the mudbox monster sculpt, since it was made from a default sphere the Polygon distribution was very very uneven. At 2 million poly my mudbox was maxed out, yet there were still a lot of places on the sculpt that lacked definition. The solution currently is to retopologies the sculpt so that polygons are spread evenly and resculpt the details back onto the retop’d model, short cutting this process by baking a displacement map in Maya.

This is the first time I’ve followed this workflow, but thus far it has worked. the downside is that it takes a long time to do this, but by the end you should have a mid-res model with good topology for animations and even displacements.

This is also the first time I’ve used 3DCoat, I gotta say I’m thinking about forking out the $99 for the student version just for the retopo and UV feature, its pretty awesome.

Hi-res to Mid-res retopolgy Mudbox Sculpt Steps

1. Export a level 5 – 6 hi-res obj from Mudbox ( under 1 million poly )
2. Import the high-res OBJ into 3DCoat and retopolgy the model
3. I used the new auto retopo feature, following youtube tuts , 2
4. Created the UV in 3dCoat, following vimeo tut
5. Exported the new retopo’d mid-res model to OBJ with new UV’s
6. Clean up the mid-res model in maya is needed ( tri’s, n-gons, UV’s ), re-export if needed
7. Imported both the Hi-res ( step 1 ) and the mid-res ( step 6 ) models into Maya
8. The next step is to generate a displacement map from the hi-poly model, so we don’t have to resculpt the details in mudbox.
9. In render menu > Transfer maps select the low and hi poly models
10. Follow the baking steps on this great tutorial just choose displacement instead of normal / AO
11. The trick here is to make sure you adjust the envelope so that it covers most of the hi-res.
12. Once the displacement map is saved load up mudbox
13. import the retop’d mid-res model
14. subdivide the model a few times
15. in mudbox goto > maps > sculpt model using displacement maps
16. load up the displacement map from Maya
17. If you don’t see any changed make sure you have subdivided the model and the displacement map is correct.
18. Wala! you now should have a decent platform to continue sculpting on the retop’d and uv’d model

Fun wasn’t it? This is the problem with polygon sculpting. Until Ptex and voxel sculpting is supported everywhere this will not change. Of course you can avoid all this if you start out with a base model that is already UV’d and has nice poly spread

mudbox setting for step

Retopologised mesh - woot

UVed model - sexy

clicky for hi-res horror!

Freestyle sculpt in Mudbox from default sphere, took me 2 – 3 hours for the sculpting and another hour for texturing & lighting.

This is a straight render from Mudbox with diffuse, spec and gloss maps. Light with HDR lightmap and a single direction light. I used both AO filters and tone mapping.

Was about 2 million polys, my poor computer was struggling real bad by the end of it. If I was to take this piece further will have to retopo it for sure.
The creature design is based on concept sketches by Jordu Schell.

Hmmm interesting

Brekel Kinect

Brekel Kinect is an application using a Microsoft Kinect, and PrimeSense’s OpenNI and NITE.

and the guys from Autodesk Area did a quick demo of it with motion-builder also here. http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/louis/3ds_max_and_motion_builder_workflow_and_a_bit_of_kinect

what a beautifully packaged and executed piece.

just subscribed to this brilliant magazine ( download only ), 12 issues for a low low price of $50 aud. What a bargain!

link