Mudbox

Though I had ‘toyed’ briefly with Mudbox and to a smaller extent Zbrush, our tutorial on Thursday was the first time I had properly say down and worked with Mudbox. I found the programme difficult as first, mainly due to issues with symmetry for instance it was all too easy when using the ‘Grab’ tool to grab a part of the head along the outline which would cause errors like the one below…



However it was easy to correct and I soon learned that errors were mainly due to now ‘Grabbing’ at the outermost outline point of the head. The other issue I faced was unavoidable and this was the differences between the side and front view photographs. As much as they are lined up as well as possible, because of the differences in lighting expression etc, there were always inconsistencies between the two view when I came to model them.

I much preferred Mudbox over Autodesk’s other programme Maya, this is mainly due to the software’s intuitiveness and similarity to real world sculpting. The tools took a while to fully get to grips with and required a lot of ‘fine-tuning’ before I was able to use them properly. I found that every tool I used, I greatly decreased the strength. Leaving the strength high led to errors such as this one…



I created some test heads, to practice using the tools and to get me used to drawing the contours of the head before I started on my actual model of my subject.

As I previously mentioned it was initially difficult to perceive the 2D display and see my model as existing in a 3D space and to remind myself that I was sculpting rather than drawing or painting so I read more into the subject of 3D space and read the relevant parts of Tom Appizi (2009) ‘Inspired 3D modelling and texture mapping’ which explains the concept of the Cartesian Coordinate System which is the mathematical system the computer uses to create an object in 3D space. This is explained further in the below diagram...



Apizzi quickly summarizes and defines the system of 3D space and the use of Locals, Objects and Gimbals which otherwise would have been quite daunting.