Mudbox practice

Today I have been working on a new sculpt, a maori man. 
Recently I re-watched some Rugby matches that were on, and I always seem to be hypnotised by the All Blacks New Zealand rugby team. This spurred me on to learning about the Maori culture, and made me really want to have a go at sculpting someone with the typical Maori tattoos.

"Māori are over-represented in each stage of the criminal justice system in New Zealand. This over-representation has been rising since the 1960s. Although Māori are over-represented in nearly all crime areas the highest figures are for violent crime followed by dishonesty offences." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_culture#Origins

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Mudbox practice 2

After creating a head sculpt yesterday, I decided to practice creating a body in Mudbox and Maya.
I started off with the default human body base mesh and bulked the body out a large amount. With hopes that somehow I could add the head I made yesterday onto the sculpt, I decided to chop the mesh's head off, through deleting the faces and filling the hole afterwards on Maya. However, as I will explain later into this post, I am unable to do this in Mudbox itself.
Using my research into lighting a few days ago, I managed to add some lighting effects onto the body after painting on a rock-styled texture with moss too. I also added a bump map in order to create more texture using cracks and slight raises in the sculpt.
After bulking the mesh out in Mudbox and texturing it, in order to add elements of weight, I added some joints in the back, arms and legs in order to make the body pose.
I am happy with the body sculpt and I wish I could join the head and body together in Mudbox, however as far as I am unaware this is not a feature available in Mudbox, and to join the parts I would have to use another application, such as Maya. I am not completely confident in how to process this, all I can guess is that the features 'combine' and 'merge' would be used. I intend to seek further advice on how I could go about this process through either going online, searching CG forums and asking, or asking someone with experience at Uni.

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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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