Mudbox practice

Since we do not have any set tutorials this week at Uni, I have decided to learn about different texture maps and lighting. Today I learnt about diffuse layers, specular layer, bump maps and different types of lighting, such as the image-based light.
This research greatly helped in this afternoon's sculpture I made of (yes, a generic character) a troll. Despite many people criticising sculpters on YouTube for uploading videos of fantasy characters like this because they are 'generic', I feel that creating this character has helped me learn the anatomy of the face by exaggerating muscles and bone structure.

Here is the different maps of this sculpt:

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Update

I decided to create a map of ideas that came to mind during the course of yesterday, and have collected quite a lot of useful thoughts and notes from this. I also decided to check out other applicants' entries and discovered that there are many 'human' characters that have been entered, which has kind of pushed me away from sculpting this race. How ever, I will not totally rule it out because I need as much practice sculpting any characters at the moment, in particular, realistic-looking characters.

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Hand-in complete, time for a new task

With all three of our projects handed in today, we have been set a new task to fill the time between now and our next line-up of projects (which I have recently had a look at and feel excited to start on them!)

We were given the freedom on what we can do to some extent, but to summarise, we have to follow the brief of a competition online (I will link these competitions below) and then show Mark our work next Thursday.

The competition choices are as follows:

http://challenge.cgsociety.org/mudbox
http://cghub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8942
http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/current

At the moment, I am swaying more towards the CG Society competition because 3D sculpture interests me greatly and would love to improve my anatomical knowledge and sculpting skills.

I have started to make a mindmap of possible sculpt ideas, how ever because I have only used Mudbox for a short amount of time, a lot of the ideas may not be achievable at this current stage. For example, I am not completely aware on how to paint realistic textures onto the sculpt as of yet, how ever through highlighting these weaknesses, I can research the solutions and improve.

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Mudbox sculpt complete

Stopped work on the Mudbox sculpt and topology layer now. Although there's always room for improvement, considering this is the first time I've used Mudbox, I am happy with the results and will continue to use Mudbox in the future. I have enjoyed this project the most, and this is probably reflected through the sheer amount of blog posts I have made on this topic! All-in-all, I believe that I have spent well over ten hours on this sculpt, and I am definitely looking forward to improving my anatomical knowledge and sculpting skill using this application. :-D

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Maya animations complete

I finished the animation project a couple of weeks ago, and since then have been tweaking parts slightly and focusing on our other 2 projects too.

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Independent Study Week

Unfinished digital painting, never managed to start the mane in time before starting our new projects. Maybe one day I'll come back to this :-)

During the independent study week, I have managed to get a large stockpile of work complete including:

- walk, run and jump animation cycle

- the sculpt of The Rock

- the topology layer of the sculpt

- and the 1,000 word report

This is most of this term's projects complete, which leaves me a week before the deadline to make final tweaks to the projects.
Unfortunately during the week I injured my writing/drawing hand whilst on my shift at work (lots of heavy-lifting is included) which means I found it incredibly hard to work, especially with the topology layer (hence it's awfully wobbly lines!)
However, it's a massive relief to know that I have done the work and to the best of my ability. 

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Topology layer

After spending two hours trying out different toplogies today, I have finally settled with a topology layer that I feel work okay because the edge loops follow around the eyes, mouth and cheek muscles. Unfortunately there is one tri, how ever during the research stages of topology, I found out that tris are normally acceptable if placed in a spot that does not get animated a lot, so thankfully the tri shouldn't be a hindrance because it is placed behind the ear.
However, we have a critique tomorrow so I'm going to take the sculpt in and maybe Mark/Leigh will be able to offer some further feedback on how to improve the work.

A picture of our project: to draw on a topology layer. Note: This picture was taken whilst working, and wasn't complete at that stage.

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WIP

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Draft of Contextual Studies Report

Today I finished my first draft of the Contextual Studies Roles and Practices report.
Unfortunately (or fortunately in some other peoples' opinions) I am 500 words over the limit, and intend on cutting down the words later on this week.
Naturally, I feel that this job will be particularly hard, as would anyone because I feel that all content within that essay proves useful in understanding the current games sector. So I have e-mailed Sharon my first draft, with the hopes that she will offer an insight on how I can improve my writing style and the content within.

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The Rock WIP

Recently did more work on the Mudbox sculpt - fixed the temple, cheek bones and jaw structure. I have now started to work on the ears, the printscreen below shows work on the ear, so far the ear has taken approximately one hour.

Edit:
Thinking of posting it onto various social media websites for feedback, possibly CG forums to get professional feedback and critique too. I feel this would definitely help improve my work.

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E-mails sent out for research

Today I sent out e-mails and messages via Social Media websites, to various gaming studios with hopes that some will reply back with invaluable advice. In turn, this could aid me in fulfilling the researching elements required in my latest Contextual Studies essay because this advice will come from pros that already work in the gaming industry.

Let's hope they will reply.
If not, I shall have to go back to researching interviews online.

Note: I have blurred out personal pieces of information to respect other's privacy.

Edit:
10th February: Already received an e-mail back, woohoo!
15th February: No other e-mails received since the 10th, proving to be very tricky for both indie and larger studios to respond, it appears. Decided to send out another 10 e-mails to indie companies, with hopes that maybe they might be able to respond instead. I'll update again soon.
16th Februrary: Received 2 new e-mails this morning that were in response to my e-mail - yay! I am now beginning to collect a balanced amount of e-mails to provide evidence for both indie and triple A studios.

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Attempts at creating good topology

Today I tried to create a wireframe over the sculpt, that would show how the topology would look if this mesh was made in a program such as Maya.
How ever, I found this incredibly hard in areas such as the mouth and the nose, where I found myself getting tris in certain places. Obviously, this would create problems in the animation processes, so I have deleted the topology layer and aim to to keep experimenting with different topologies over this week, to try and find one that will aim to use quad polys only.

Above: My first (and incorrect) topology layer, which unfortunately got tris in the nose and mouth area. I have highlighted these in a purple colour above.

After a break, I came back to Mudbox and started on a new wireframe to show good edge flow... I'm much happier with this one because I have not found any tri polys so far. How ever, there are more 5 sided faces in this, which arguably, could be just as problematic as a tri.
Also, the quads are fairly cluttered, I am aware that more polys = more detail, but a good topology has clean, even polys, and I do not believe this has this yet... Anyway, here is a picture of the face complete:

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Research into topology.

Recently Mark introduced us to topology and keeping good edge flow and asked us to research topology, it's importance and how to achieve it.

Since I have been interested in 3D modelling, I've collected many images of wireframes that will prove particularly helpful with various designs. A few weeks ago, I made a page on this blog with a few of these images on, which can be seen here: http://capleass.blogspot.com/p/modelling.html

Important notes:

Quads:

Face meshes deform in animation, so to avoid problem during this stage, it's important to keep even strips of quads in the mesh. This will help keep the mesh look even and ensure the lighting works well.

Poor topology can cause problems during the animation, rigging and unwrapping processes.

Tris in meshes can cause these problems because they break edge loops and behave weirdly in animation.
Be cautious when using poles as they break/redirect edge loops and can create smoothing artefacts too.

How ever, sometimes it will be hard to avoid these in complicated meshes, so it's important to place these in areas that will not deform much during animation (e.g. cheekbones, side of the forehead), or places where they will help route the topology to where I want it to go.

Loops around the mouth, eyes, jaw and eyebrows:

These are often areas that are animated the most, and therefore need the cleanest geometry, so that when they deform they will still look nice and work well. It is important to keep quad loops around these features, preferably a couple of rings deep because the face is constructed of strips of polys that flow between these loops.


Subdivision Topology: Artifacts from The Guerrilla CG Project on Vimeo.


Helpful forum thread links:

http://www.artnatomia.net/uk/artnatomiaIng.html - Interactive face, muscles, skull research
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=25&t=38469&page=1&pp=15 - Topology research
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=108412 - Body topology
http://www.theminters.com/misc/articles/derived-surfaces/derived-surfaces.pdf - Bay Raitt's advice

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Mudbox WIP: The Rock

More work on The Rock sculpt, made the eyes and eyebrows a little more pronounced, worked more on the nose and added a slight paint layer where I stamped on a light texture to mark out the hair line, eyebrows and beard (which you cannot see in this printscreen because I have hidden the layers whilst I carry on working.)

I also tested out Mudbox's painting tools and managed to create a pore effect, how ever, I don't believe the brief asks us to create a texture for the sculpture, so my use of paint brushes is merely for learning experience purposes only.

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Mudbox brief: The Rock

Lots more work to be done, but I thought I'd share this to show who I have chosen for my new brief: to create a digital sculpt of a head.
I believe 'The Rock' (Dwayne Johnson) would be an interesting person to sculpt because he is incredibly bulky and muscular, thus act as a great way in spurring me on to learn about the human anatomy e.g. muscular and bone structure.

Here are some reference pictures I've used for sculpting so far:

Below is my sculpt so far:

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Digital painting: The Rock (1hr30min study)

Here is a digital painting I made of The Rock, in order to understand the structure of his face more. I set myself a time limit of one and a half hour for this painting.

It's far from perfect and could be tweaked lots around the eyes and lips area, but I haven't ever drawn a face digitally in Photoshop before, so I'm hoping to keep improving.

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Mudbox brief: The Rock line drawings

We have been set our latest brief, to sculpt a face digitally and I have decided to go for WWE superstar Dwayne Johnson, better known as 'The Rock'. I chose to sculpt him because he has a strong, bulky figure which will be a great opportunity to allow me to research into the human anatomy.

After researching into human facial anatomy, I collected pictures of The Rock (which will be seen in the post after this) and started to draw out the frame of his face and important pieces of detailing that would add realistic elements to my sculpt.

The red lines show the important features on that face and the blue lines represent the detailing that will help make the sculpt look more similiar to The Rock.

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Mudbox attempt #2

After looking hard at my first attempt, I decided to scrap that sculpture and start alll over again.
How ever this time, I added more structure to the face through adding cheek bones and other muscles to add an element of realism to the sculpt.

After this I decided to play around with the stamp tool to create effects such as the hair and moustache.

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Research: Human anatomy

I have decided to look into the human anatomy, in particular the face, in order to create as realistic of a sculpture as I can. A knowledge into the human anatomy will help provide a strong element of realism into the sculpture because I will be able to sculpt in muscle tissue and bone structure.

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An introduction to Mudbox

Recently we had our first Mudbox induction with Mark, this came about as our new brief is to sculpt a head in Mudbox.

Having tried Mudbox out once before, I have to admit I wasn't looking forward to this brief because I am a rubbish sculpter and lack skill in controlling tablets (haha.)
How ever, I am looking forward to the prospects of learning about anatomy and developing skill in sculpting and drawing.

Today I decided to open up Mudbox again, and with some new tips Mark told us about yesterday in mind I tested out different short keys and the toolbox.
The sculpt below is my first ever attempt at sculpting a face on Mudbox, and although I am not happy with it all, I feel there is much time to improve between now and the coursework deadline date.

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