IMM 370 II: Electric Boogaloo

I'm taking this again because 1. I love 3D and 2. advanced credit so I thought it would be alright to continue the blog where I left off. I have too many Blogger things going on already. So this post will mark the Fall 2011 class.
A quick about me if you don't want to go back to page 1:
Emily Calfo, senior IMM major.
Enjoys Maya and long hours in the lab.
I'm interested in working for a game design studio when I graduate.
I have two pet gerbils, they are adorable.
Last semester I made this. Rigging it was the highlight of spring.

Turntable

Mudbox mayhem

Through the course of this project, Mudbox has done some really incomprehensible things. I screencapped some of them.

I tried to pan around and part of the head disappeared.

Also tried to pan and the hair piece became a spiny mass.

Clicked once, everything became jagged. Shortly after this the entire computer crashed.

UV documentation continued

I think I found a solution, sort of. First I sent the hair piece to Maya.

Then I opened up the UV editor in the Windows menu, selected the object, and mapped the UVs. I did Automatic mapping for the sake of time because this was an experiment on my part, but laying them out will probably make it look nicer.

Then I re-imported it to Mudbox and repeated the export as PSD step. This time I had the UV layout I mapped, which had less overlapping of faces. This is the new result.

Less streaking on the rings

Documentation about UVs

Doing textures in Mudbox must not be like doing them in Maya at all. I found a way to export things as PSDs in the UV view, so I tried it for the hair because I thought it might be easier.

And I made something in Photoshop that I would have liked to use for the hair.

But I can't import the .tif file in. What I can do it import channel from PSD (right below export) but that gave me some weird results.

Character progress

I tried working with the hair in two different ways. First I tried to make a hairpiece from a sphere in Mudbox.

Getting the tentacles to bend was difficult

Greg asked if it might be easier to extrude the tentacles in Maya, so I gave it a shot.

Polygon wig

The imported hair. It still needs work but hopefully it will be easier to mold.

Also, if anyone needs to know how to import from Maya to Mudbox, you have to export the Maya model as an FBX. Mudbox can't open ma or mb files.

File -> Export Selection -> FBX export

Mudbox character

I managed to successfully digitize my clay model and import it to Maya/Mudbox. It was kind of wobbly-looking in Maya but converting it to polygons smoothed it out some.

Nurbs curves lofted, looking like melty ice cream

Polygon model proxied

Importing it to Mudbox wasn't hard. Making it look not terrible kind of is.

What it first looked like

Current progress. I don't know where the hole in the head came from but I plan to cover it with hair.

I tried moving the view around and suddenly the top of the head was gone. I'm not sure why.

Clay head model

Final project ideas

I threw around a couple ideas for a character bust. I wanted to do some sort of non-human, like an alien. My initial ideas were insect or Swamp-thing based.

Alien

Fish-frog

Insect

I started to lean towards the idea of a monster mermaid- something other than the pretty cartoon versions. My inspirations were the Harry Potter concept of a mermaid

and the blue ring octopus, a beautiful but venomous little animal.

Has enough venom to kill 26 adults in minutes

 My concept sketches:

Midterm portfolio

Croquis

Class sketch

Class sketch

Skeleton

Formal drawing

Character sketch

Spring break sketches

I was sadly deprived of Mudbox but I did draw a bunch of random junk around my house.

Sketches from class, 2/22

Mudbox

 I searched for something I could use reference images to make, like how we did the egg, so I needed something common and fairly symmetrical. I found an image of a skull from both angles, so I went with that. The mouth is where I had a problem, again. It looked ugly and unrealistic so I didn't bother saving it.

Sketches, week of 2/15

Some stuff from class. Second is gesture sketches of people during break. And the skeleton had a helmet on at the time.

From the life drawing mini course in Brower. I don't really like this one and I'm not a fan of working in charcoal.

Drawn by looking at my reflection in a laptop during a lecture.

Sketch post

On Sunday I took the riverline to go visit some friends. The jostling made my hand a little unsteady but whenever the train stopped to pick up new passengers, I used that as a chance to do a gesture sketch. It's mostly chairs and stuff on the platform but there was a lady sitting across from me for a couple stations. It's really faint, I don't own a scanner so I had to take a picture and mess around with the color settings.

I downloaded some sketches to practice with. One is of Andromeda.

I'm not sure who the second one is supposed to be.