Week 4: More Mudboxing

I've spent a lot of time texturing my model and I'm very happy with the results. It took me longer than expected because I was learning the limits/capabilities of Mudbox at the same time. Unfortunately this has put me behind schedule. I would have like to have set up lighting, toon shaders and rendered by now. I'll have to work twice as hard next week.

All the textures I'd been applying in Mudbox were 2K. I had to separate the heads of the guitar into another scene because the program couldn't withstand the size the file was growing to. The knowledge I've gained thus far will help me improve the workflow for creating my character.

The process of exporting each map separately (diffuse, specular, gloss, incandescence, normal) and figuring out which were the correct nodes to plug them into back in Maya greatly confused me. I found a cheat way to get them straight into Maya with all the textures flattened and applied to the model automatically.

I selected the object; under file, I sent them to a new scene in Maya (this scene later had to be named at set in a file directory the project window).

Mudbox flattened all the texture channels and saved them into the directed file.

They appeared in a new Maya scene like so, at their base subdivisional level (0), rather than with subdivisions applied 6 times like in Mudbox. They appeared with the default Mudbox material.

Back in Mudbox, under file I selected 'Update current scene in Maya.'

The textures were added immediately to the models in Maya. As you can see the specularity maps in particular appeared less shiny, but this can be adjusted by tweaking the attributes for the material and lighting.

I was also able to skip all this complex work of plugging the right nodes in correctly, in the hyper-shade window:

This week I met up with Ellie my guitarist and discussed with her the basic movements and sound effects I was going for in the animation. With the assistance of Patrick, another audio student at SAE we are going to book a recording studio in Week 7 and smash this out in a day. Because we've organised it early, Ellie is happy to add a second supporting guitar and drums along with the riff. Fortunately she is able to play and record this on her own and as a back up, the supporting instruments can be added electronically.

I need to send her a few ideas of 30 'mashups' of existing songs an storyboard of the movement, to give her an idea of the mood. We are both very excited about this.

See you next week!