Doctor doctor, I´ve got a fever- and the only cure is more mudbox!

Screenshot (lo-res) of a successful normal map config from Blender, running cycles engine

As my previous project entry date probably suggests, I may have to admit, that I am not the best diary keeper out there.  Never the less, I am trying to adjust myself to the habit of keeping regular documentation of my doings and thoughts from now on.

So, just recently I got really excited about putting my hands into virtual clay, when experimenting with asmall 3D project. By a random chance, I had the opportunity to dig out an older piece of work, which also can be found from my gallery here. So I took this older model of the human hand and polished it somewhat with Mudbox, sculpted bloodvessels and examined the anatomy more carefully, even did some very crude skin pattern- texturing. And oh my- had so much fun with it!

Being an old pottery hobbyist, I can´t help it but feel really primal and genuine joy every time I´ve got a good reason to play a little with Mudbox. It feels always silly afterwards, that I even needed a “good reason” to touch this cool software and technology and remember how awesome it is.  My only cause of dissatisfaction at the moment is really the fact that Mudbox seems to generate alarmingly many unnecessary errrors into the normal maps that are baked. After some studying, trial and error too, I gave up altogether the effort to generate any kinds of maps within the programme, as there is a smaller plugin- like behaving software called “Xnormal“, which seems to me much more stable and error- free option ( Free in monetary terms too, I really recommend trying it out if any of you are experiencing similar difficulties with your models and their normal maps.)

So during this project, I was able to try out many cool things: Sculting very fine details into a realistic model, playing with some brushes, scraping  it with some texture arcs, printing my loving strokes into various maps and then taking the whole show into Blender, where I created an IK to FK- switchable skeleton for the hand and did some meditation on the inner life of the Blender´s (somewhat infamous) node editor to connect all the “wires” correct to see how my sculpting turned out. Mostly I was happy with my experimentations and what came out of them. I have a feeling that me and Mudbox should be friends, close friends.

Never the less, I really hope I am able to sculpt little more frequently  in the future.  But definitely, all reasons to touch Mudbox are good reasons. There might be another project coming up quite soon, where I could do some real time- character maps with it, but I would rather unveil it little bit later, as deadlines are getting agreed and set.