Mudbox is awesome

OK, so it's been a while since my last post but only because I've had to work on other stuff. Apparently we have so much spare time we should really be doing a million other stupid little meaningless assignments and not working on our major final year project. Really, i mean it's not like it's important or anything. I'm sure we can pull out a fantastic little short film in the 2 weeks off in between doing other pointless shit. It's not like it takes long to do an animated film. I understand now why previous years' final animation projects have been so disappointing.
I mean I haven't really done any animation in almost a year but that's ok it's only an ANIMATION DEGREE!
But hey, I'm not bitter....really...

Now that I got that off my chest, onto the important stuff.

I've been working on modelling some characters for our film and in doing so familiarising myself with Mudbox. First impressions are it's pretty awesome.
I modelled a basic low-res human character in Maya and took it into Mudbox to add detail and got a little carried away. I then took that model and modified it to make a bunch of other characters using the sculpt layers feature. All these characters are using the same mesh and texture, normal and displacement maps.

These aren't final versions but just quick muck-around tests and renders.
Oh and the skin texture is pretty quick and nasty (ie.- crappy) but that was just me playing around with the texture painting ability in Mudbox.
I think I'll have to tone down the detail on the normal and displacement maps cos it's a bit too much.





Bum chins are awesome...





And this one's a combination or blend of 2 of the above models using the sculpt layers blending ability in Mudbox.


And finally here's an example of what happens when things go wrong with displacement maps and normal maps with Mental Ray.