Mudbox 101

hi this is Paul Neil and here's a quick overview of how to get around Mudbox in this case I'm using Mudbox 2014 should be the same principles and whatnot in in the newer version 2015 or even previous versions for that matter shell looks somewhat similar so what we have then is a basic layout here we have a viewport in front of us and that viewport has a grid on it that we can build on just like in a 3d app menu system up top the viewports tabbed with different tabs we have a UV layout for inspecting our UVs an image browser for browsing images and finding them on our on our local folders we also have the Mudbox community which basically is a web browser for all intents purposes and takes us straight into the area where we can log in and get to access to other assets and whatnot for use in Mudbox over on the right hand side we have I guess you know compared to Mac's would be something like the command panel for instance or in in Maya you know the panel for handling all of our settings and and whatnot it looks a little bit like a cross between you know Mac's mud bog Macs Photoshop and Maya somehow in this case we have layers up top sculpting and painting layers these work much like Photoshop do with a you know visibility icon and add delete masking other options for dealing with those layers down next we have on objects list this is all the objects currently in the scene we can filter that and show only what kind of objects we want so everything that's in the scene is shown in here lights cameras objects materials everything viewport filters this changes how the viewport is drawn more sort of a fluff kind of feature on there when we're at any given tool depending what it is all the properties will show up by default in this properties window at the bottom here with extra settings that we should note things like fall-off and advanced settings for our brushes and everything else across the bottom we have a tab layout for our sculpting tools so these are all the tools for sculpting objects painting curves poses select and manipulate type tools we'll get to all these and how they function and then across this side more tabs stamps for basically texturing the brushes again for both sculpting and painting stencils for sculpting and painting which is you know an overlay on the viewport where you can paint through onto your object fall-off properties for your brushes materials lights camera bookmarks things of that nature so it's pretty simple UI overall the way it's laid out which is really nice because photo you know Mudbox re is very easy to to learn and for that reason one of the things I do right away I'm a primarily a max user so I'm using 3d studio max most the time I like the hotkey navigation setup in Max and so when I'm bouncing back and forth between Max and Mudbox I prefer to have the hotkeys the same funnily enough fighting ever do any bouncing back and forth between my own mud box I like to switch mud box over to Maya so I don't have to do the switch back and forth my hotkeys as I'm as I'm functioning from one to the other we can do that up here which is in Windows hotkeys so if you're like me and you're a max user mostly we can go and set it to max the thing is it doesn't actually set it to max hotkeys entirely there's a couple of things missing that are rather important first off there's draw inverse now the default for draw inverse in in Mudbox is control which I believe it is in Maya as well for the paint tools and Max it's actually alt so it's alt left mouse button so we need to switch that up something to know about switching hotkeys in here it's a bit on if I have control it will give me a warning right away and if I try to continue clicking on anything else to change my hotkey to some combination that I want it'll actually overwrite this one along the way and I may not want to do that so what you need to do is you need to find a sort of a something that doesn't change what you want like maybe changing that then turning this on then turning you know something else off and sort of jump around until you get the combination without changing a bunch of other hotkeys along the way so it's a little bit a little bit messy the way that was developed so let's draw inverse the other one is is focus and we'll find that second there it is so in three studio max it's zoomed to the sceners in with a selected object or assumed assumed to the selected sub object sub component or whatever in Maya its F for framing and you know works the same sort of way and a little frame around whatever you have selected well problem is is that focus on selection is is here nothing selected it's the entire scene so this is selected objects essentially and it's a a you know gets set by default when you switch over to max to the control out said that it is in max however focus on Mouse never gets set and is left completely blank so don't even leave it on F that which is the Mudbox default and the maya default it gets just left blank so you can't do that and you absolutely must be able to do this to be able to work effectively so I set it to Zed which is zoom selected in this case it's actually focus on Mouse which means that it's going to bring you to your mouse point and it'll actually zoom based on the size of the brush that you're currently using so that's an absolute must to set up and get that working I believe all the brush size and whatnot gets set correctly now as well so I think they're set for your brush brush sizing whatnot sam and max control shift and shift alt for your size and your strength again you could switch back to the my defaults and and use those if you want which is up B mm B and M and so we're just going to close out of that I've got them set up I can navigate the way I like now and what we'll do next is we'll just jump into start sculpting something and utilizing the UI and and be able to get around it and understand how it all functions so let's get started with a quick test sculpt so when we first start my box are actually going to see the new scene dialog box pop-up which is kind of nice because it's going to be giving you a bunch of preset meshes that you can start with start playing around with you actually have all of the learning Mudbox tutorials so this is pretty much the same sort of thing what I'm showing you here but you know utilizing and telling you how to get around some you know specific sort of tool sets and whatnot you'll also have the last open files you can see current characters that I'm working on as well as past characters and whatnot that I've worked with I'm just going to go with a basic head and be a good starting point let's take a look at some of the menus here display we probably don't need our grid zipping around there it's just more data on-screen than we actually need you may or may not have a wireframe I think it comes on by default that's W on the keyboard and those can be found under display so we can see a wireframe here for W and we can also see the grid down here which doesn't have a hotkey if you notice assigned to it but what's nice is it Mudbox uses the same sort of hotbox system that Maya does if we press the spacebar this hotbox comes up we have things like our sculpting tools painting tools viewports kinematic type stuff shaders and move tools and transforming tools and whatnot as well as we also have our brush size or brush strength and a middle menu again which opens a hotbox style system in this case right now I think I even have mirror turned on so we could go into mirror and then up and then turn mirror off or just go click on the X again it'll toggle it on and off and what's nice about this hot box is you can get used to where things are for instance the grid there's we can turn that off by right-clicking off of the object you'll see that we get one menu system up so this is without holding the space bar at all or we can right-click over the object and get a different menu up one that maybe allow us to be able to deal with materials for the object isolate and certain more object based tools and then more sort of viewport based tools now there's grid right above it so we can right-click and then click on grid turn that off or on what's nice about the system is it works like Maya's we don't actually have to wait for it to come up we can just swipe up knowing that it's up in that quadrant and it'll turn on and off so we can also do that multiple ones for instance the mirror local mirror we can just turn it on and off knowing that we all we have to do is swipe sideways and up for the next one and we can go about turning it on and off and it can be very quick and easy so I try and learn these sorts of things in a piece of software as quickly as possible the fast ways around so that I'm not having to think about where tools are where to go or having to take my eyes off my work go up find a menu turn on the grid display turn on something else and then have to go back and look at my work again you kind of forget what you're doing almost when you're when you're not working smoothly so by default we have this sculpting tool space sculpt sculpt down so that is as easy as just doing that to get into the sculpt tool and it brings us into the sculpt tool now what the sculpt tool does when we start painting it will make this beautiful mess right off the bat basically it's just pulling by default the vertices straight out along their normals and then again whatever new normals there are on that mesh now as soon as we've initiated that sculpt tool the properties over here are now showing the properties for that brush so we can get into advanced parameters fall-off parameters you know so these are the advanced mostly the brush sir things how those normals are being pulled minimum strength and size for your brush for the pressure sensitivity in your Wacom tablet just to note you absolutely have to be using a Wacom tablet or Cintiq type monitor system to work in a sculpting environment you cannot do it with a mouse effectively every now and again I have somebody who tells me they can and of course I look at their sculpts and no indeed they can't so we need to you know be using a tablet for this kind of tool we have size and strength here now we also know that we set them up or again you can be using the Mudbox defaults but mine's ctrl shift for size and alts if for for strength and I can work with those and of course here's the mirror function for mirroring because we want it to be mirrored I can turn that on through my menu system and a bunch of other tools like stamp spacing and alike which is usually set up at 25 I think by default or somewhere around there and that's how many times the brush dabs on-screen actively and it'll actually kind of change the strength of your brush and make it a little less if that goes up there's less dabbing happening depending on the scale of your object and depending on how small you're painting with the density of your meshes and everything else you might want to decrease or increase this to speed up slow down the UI now something just before we get started as well in Mudbox if we go into the windows and we go into preferences there's a another setting that we want to change here as we start pushing things and this is this under render fast render scale and what we can do is we can turn that up and we can actually speed up sort of the UI or even the level change tolerance and what it'll do is it'll it'll speed up the UI a bit because it's not trying to update things quite as much and what you'll find is is that it measures get very very dense your machine must start might might start chugging a little bit in Mudbox so let's start doing a little bit of sculpting so I'm going to start maybe pulling brows out obviously brushes way too strong and we can pull that down and we can just start going and pushing on it now you might give this message up it says mesh you're trying to sculpt on is too coarse meaning if we look at the wireframe so the size of the brush that we're painting with it's too coarse and we're not going to get detail out of this because there just aren't isn't enough vertices so what we want to do is we want to start kind of course to begin with and we want to shape the head to make it look like what we want sculpt tool is one but what we might want to go is with just the grab tool that's a swipe straight up or again the grab tool here and the grab tool is a brush allows us to be able to grab an and pull chunks of the mesh out and whatnot and we're probably going to want to make sure that our mirror is on so that we're doing working symmetrically right now and we can go in and start sculpting sort of or just pushing and pulling again we'll use fairly big brushes at this point we're try get a sort of a nice shape going I'm just going to kind of pull that here down a bit more for the fun of it think I want to point to your chin and more of a rounded head and again we're working in 3d space you can't sculpt from one direction you've got to go all the way around your model and look at it every which way you possibly can let's give them a bit bigger shoulders too much neck coming in there and I'm actually going to make them a bit more hunched over in a sense maybe even push his shoulders back a bit more so we want to start off with getting some of these basic shapes look at your overall sort of you know shapes of your of your mesh to get what your you're going for and don't worry about any kind of details early on once you get to a certain point your to say okay it's time to start sculpting and getting a bit more form in here we might need you know a more detail in the mesh to be able to work with so if we go up to a mesh add subdivision level or shift D they'll actually notice that the mesh has actually gone up one level and at this point we can still sculpt but we did something that we really shouldn't have done from the first place we actually messed with their base head so we can't get back to our original head anymore I can't get rid of any of the you know changes I've made other than undos so just like Photoshop you want to work in your layers as much as possible so in this case instead of working on the base layer I'm going to do is we want to add a new layer and as soon as I start working on this layer you'll notice it says this L column here the base will always work on all of them this new layer now is they start to actually work on it I could say well let's do a little bit more pushing and pulling let's try a few more things and I'm just going to pull this down here let me like this you suddenly decide well that's not what I want I can easily ramp that layer on and off and check and see what I've got it basically like a morph target we can also go into another brush and just and erase it if we want and this is the nice part about this it's easy to erase from a layer so always working layers always add a layer right from square one don't do what I did to start with and work on the base object head make sure that you're starting with it begin to begin with so now that we have the subdivision level yell out and we started manipulating the mesh at that level you'll notice that this under L which is the level of detail is set to one now what it's telling you is is that we started manipulating this head on level one of our of our subdivisions instead of level zero it will be locked to that level now we can only paint in this layer when we're actually viewing level one and so let's just do a bit of work here and let's go and try another brush so the sculpt brush is that one for you know sculpting and adding some shapes let's try and get a little bit of shape around his jawbone and whatnot the thing with the sculpt brush is it likes to work really it a little bit better at sort of a higher density level mesh and there's one that's really nice for doing softer sort of again bigger global changes and that is the foamy brush and so the foamy brush when we look at that it's just down here in the menu so this is a sometime they actually have to click and go and pick out of the menu the foamy brush just gives you a bit of a softer result and if you roll your mouse over any of these you'll see that it actually comes up with a description of what that brush is and what its intended to do for you so again we have our mirror on we could think of maybe you know going quite soft on our and you can see that it's actually when you play with it it's actually a fair bit softer than the sculpting tool the way it works and so we can start painting it in now the way it works just like it does with clay with clay you tend to build up a piece so let's just do something stream you tend to build up a piece and then you tend to smooth it back in with your fingers again when you're working so you tend to sort of chunk on you know put a piece of clay on and then you blend that clay in same thing happens here and the way it happens in in sculpting is is that we sculpt some so we bring it out maybe which gets a little bit rough and we want to smooth it out so we want to go over to the smooth brush and smooth it out and we want to go back to the foamy brush and build it up and then we're going to go a smooth brush and smooth it out and obviously this is a lot of clicking back and forth and you probably wouldn't do as much smoothing as you need to so there is a hotkey sort of built in to the workflow that allows for this this is nice and simple from any brush that you're using we can paint so weather over there foamy now to start building up this jawline and all we have to do is hold down shift and we immediately enter temporarily the smooth brush so just holding down that shift puts us into so we can paint shift smooth just sculpt shifts smooth and again depending on the density of the mesh is how well the smoothing is going to happen on the mesh how much smoothing is going to happen essentially so the whole process is this process of lifting the mesh up smoothing it down trying to get rid of those bumps again using your pressure sensitivity on your tablet to get more or less as you need it and right now again we're not thinking about details we're thinking about strictly just some big global changes and big sort of you know soft changes we might want to go back to where grab brush want to thin the nose out up top here even more maybe even spread the eye eyelids or so the eye bone top the eye at getting some big sort of buggy eyes maybe or something again even in the grab brush I can smooth as I go you might want to consider the ears at this point start thinking about a little bit of shape and sort of size and form of these and again if I do something I don't really like or it's close just smooth it out again and start pushing things around the way you want again big global changes at this point I could even start looking at a mouth here but you know if we went to our foamy brush again and we start trying to paint in a mouth well the mouth is the lips aren't these things that stick out of the surface we could try and cut them in but really we don't have the resolution of mesh to start doing a mouth at this point we can kind of get the lump or the mouth is going to go that overall form of where the mouth is going to be but there's no way we're actually going to get anything other than that with the current density of the mesh so don't try and go too far at any given mesh density the other thing is is we also don't have any eyeballs I find it very strange and I see people modeling characters without eyeballs one of the ways people do it is by modeling the eyeball into this mesh I think that doesn't work very well especially doesn't work very well when you transfer your mesh back over to maximum my frigging you need separate eyeballs anyways so let's start with those so we've got our head kind of formed up and again there's no way we're going to get brows and eyelids and all of those nuances of an eye that are so important in a character working unless we have an eyeball to sculpt around you cannot make eyelids without an eyeball so what we need to do is we know to go create mesh and we'll just go down to fear and it'll make this absolutely gigantic sphere for us now if we look at our objects list we'll have multiple objects picked I just realized it and have my UI locked sorry usually locked by default and we're going to see all of our objects I'm just going to say all and okay we just turned on transforms for some reason that hides everything so transforms is usually transformation is usually off by default so here's the basic head we're working with and here's the sphere and one of the ways we can freeze things and lock things is just go to this eyeball and just either hide it completely or go into the lock tool and lock it that's probably more what we want right now because we don't want to accidentally grab this object because the way the brushes work is that whatever you're over it will grab so I'm going to right click on that eyeball for now and see that in my sculpt layers that we're working on the sphere again now and now I'm going to go to the move select tools and use the translate and scale tools to be able to scale them so I can just grab that white Center and move it down I can go to the translate and start moving it into place and start scaling it in the other place you can find these is right here translate being down scale being up so I can scale that down and we'll make Cyclops to begin with I'll hit my Z key to zoom it into it and let's just move that over here somewhere and scale again translate it back and it still might be a bit I mean it actually could be pretty good so we have an eyeball in there we want to place that on the other side and and move it over and have that on the on the other side so I want to say duplicate object and the duplicate object will allow us to duplicate it go figure there's also a flip mesh that allows this to be able to flip it across an axis I want to say duplicate for my other eye right click I want to say flip mesh around X and it pops my other eye in there on the other side now we can easily go into and rename these we'll call this li I'm going to just right click on this one over here and we'll call this RI so we know what they are in our list it allows this one selected now we can deselect things and reselect things if need be by just going into the right-click menu above and we can say deselect model we can also right click above model and say select model if we need need to there's also the lock and unlock options so let's lock that ID let's lock that eye and let's unlock the head again and when we right-click on this just right-click over this you can now see that we're back to our basic head sculpt layers and we're able to start sculpting around this eye so I'm going to use my sculpt tool maybe and we're going to try and get this a little bit closer to what we need again something maybe like that whenever I do these tutorials I wasn't doing this bizarre-looking heads because I don't have to think about modeling a realistic looking head while I'm talking and not paying attention any sort of reference material so we've got you know our basics starting to go in there now so now we're in a position where we might want to up residense Oh actually going to go up probably to at this point you'll see the density getting quite a bit higher we still can't put any kind of fine detail in but we'll be able to put in more detail and now we can see that that layer one that's sculpt layer one that one that's on the subdivision level one or level one is locked now we can't paint on it anymore if you try it I'll tell you you can't paint on it so that layer is locked when we're working on level one so I'm going to add a new layer and you'll see it doesn't have a level associated with it and until I just touch the mesh and do something and says hey that's now locked to level three because I have subdivided two more times so we're up to three subdivision levels on our model now we can go up and down between those so there's mesh step up step down which is the page up and page down so if I went down to you'll see we're down at level one I could go down to the base there's the base model and I can still do changes here what's nice is I could say hey you know what I really wanted to do some coarser changes here and they're going to propagate up the mesh I need to make sure that level one is picked because that's what I'm at now and I'm just going to go and pull that out and what it's actually going to do is it's going to go when I step back up again with page up its propagated all those changes up to the next layer so it's all working together so in this one I'm going to start working with a new brush that foamy brush again is good for those soft big changes on lower mesh resolutions we can actually use the sculpt brush the sculpt brush doesn't always work that well for building up and sort of laying stuff together and here's here's the difference between the two there went about to show you let's just do a sculpture I'm just going to sculpt line here line here and one across and you can see what it's doing is it's building up two lines and then pulling out the normals out from those previous lines this can be a bit of a pain so you can end up with a lot of lumps as you start to work on this the next brush that we're going to look at is going to be the wax brush this is this one's probably the one I use the most and it sort of mimics more if you think of kind of like wax how wax flows and fills the gaps between things so the brush settings are going to need to be a bit different here going to need probably a lot more strength on it and we might want to change its fall-off but what we're going to do is we're going to sculpt across again oops change my layer and we're going to change a layer and paint across you can see it's kind of doing a similar sort of thing now because I've got it so strong let's just pull it back down it starts to fill in the spaces in between and what you'll find is is it's great for filling in and sort of building up the surface we can use it to lay down and you find the right brush settings and as you go across it's not just multiplying on top one another sort of additively adding this area on top one another it's allowing you to be able to build up an area like you were laying down a whole bunch of you know wax or again clay onto the surface and and working with that so we can use that and you'll see that it will actually even start almost flattened out depending on what your strength is your brush size is it'll change kind of how that works so it's a bit of a tricky one to learn to use to begin with but what you'll notice is it's much better than trying to use the sculpt brush initially to start building up your surfaces we could consider starting to build up an eyelid now because we have an eye there I'm just going to pull a whole bunch out here and then I could make it smaller and I can push some back in and again you're going to see that there's no way we're going to get an eyelid out of the resolution of the mesh the other thing is with the resolution this mesh you'll see that here it's been pulled apart so I've pulled the mesh heavily making the polygons more spread apart and here really really small we want to try and keep that as even as possible all the time so we need to keep that mesh sort of in a relative state all the time as to how dense it's going to be so I'm going to try and just pull it out I shouldn't even really pushed it in I tend not to push it in as far just kind of hard to illustrate but now you'll see when I'm pulling it out just carefully with my eye brush the grab brush is that I'm able to maintain the sort of the spacing of the Palio polygons a little bit better and start getting myself something I can start sculpting an eyelid or you know eyelids out of doesn't look like anything like eyelids at this point that's fine smooth those back down again as I build them up back to my wax brush which is a quick skip to the side it allows me to be able to pull some stuff out and try some shapes build the mesh up in areas and even get a little bit of sort of cornering going on with it this point be rough you're not looking at sort of specific shapes now you're looking at sort of the rough overalls and so don't be afraid to just dig in to the mesh and sort of make course changes and worry about you know keeping it perfectly smooth at this point or you know really fine detail you're just not going to get it so this point we might want to consider the bottom lip maybe a little bit of a top lip thing under the nose and I always forget what it's called blend the corners of the mouth in it's going to go in there somewhere but again we're still going to have detail issues around the mouth hit Zed and zoom selected I'm just going to push the inside of the ear in a bit and then maybe you can consider at this point with a grab ruch pulling the ear out getting a bit more shape to it since we've got more geometry here to work with smooth that and back to my wax a bit more maybe a bit smaller and we'll start sculpting the inner ear into there and all that crazy detail that goes in an inner ear again at least it's giving us an idea of form you know we need to pull out the ear a bit more might be easier to do it from this way so that it pushes back so we're starting to get an ear forming and being pulled into the mesh you know again laying up wax thinking about your sides of the face here again we can just lay on some wax sort of in a sense smooth it in now we don't want to go up higher mesh level than this for quite a while there's a lot we can do at this mesh level as far as form goes if you step up higher and start trying to work higher you're going to find yourself losing control over your mesh and ending up with just a blobby mess all over the place so the trick here is is to sort of build it up and think about the structure what are the bones look like underneath what are the bony extrusions going to be like you know and again you know if you're doing a human head follow reference obviously I know I'm just going crazy with some shapes and forms here and having some fun so think about those overall big changes that need to happen and you want to do that at a level where your smooth will smooth out those if we go up any higher you can already see that it's taking a lot of work just to smooth this it's because the density of the mesh has gone up high enough that it is harder and harder to smooth because you know smooth is averaging the vertices around it well if there's a lots of vertices around them then it can take a lot more work to try and get that smooth to work but again you can see I can go quite rough now lay it in and then just smooth it out to be able to get to that next sort of you know level of detail so you can see it's quite easy to build the layer up without having to sort of worry about real finite sort of shapes and forms and just get that built up and say well this is you know I need some some mass in here let's say build that up need some mass up the back of the neck and if we still need to sort of fill in an area with a wax brush go bigger and softer and you can pass over an area and look it just fill tint and fill in that that edge so we can even make that sort of more pronounced I'll build up an edge here and we smoothed and we've got this edge so even without smoothing you can use the wax brush and larger softer and just do a pass over it you can see it just suddenly fills in that gap and then it's a little bit easier to smooth again for instance be able to get that smoothed in and shaped into the neck so spend time at this level considering your overall shape and form and making sure you've got your base you know lump of clay looking the way that you want so now that we're at this stage what we want to do is maybe move up and you've gone further we've worked around more of the mouth and whatnot and we want to go further and you know start thinking about eyelids and being able to go up again I'm going to go up two more levels to a new level five again I'm going to have to add a new layer to work on and I can add as many layers to work on level five as I want this point I'm going to hit W and turn off the wireframe and I'm gonna start looking at a couple more tools to you and see how they work again the the wax brush is going to be our friend still it's going to work very well as we as we carve in using alt to push in or carving out we can also use some of these other ones we have we have a knife brush and the knife is nice in that it pushes a line in and tries to push this line into the mesh so you can see that it pushing this line in and maybe we want to try and just cut that back in again smooth it out so you can see that pushing that line down in it's actually using a stamp already turned on that that produces that you can use it also to sort of produce a sharp edge now here's one of these cases where the stamp distance might be too high because you can really see it if we turn the stamp distance you can get result turned on you can actually get a nice high point if you want with it or again without it turned on you're pushing it down in so it's kind of a negative brush to start with and we can start you know working around this so I would still be using at this point the wax brush and I would be pushing it down but here's one of those problems I was pretty rough in this eye you're going to find it's very very difficult at this point to manipulate that and actually work with it because the smoothing brush is going to give you a lot of problems so we might be too high here so let's skip down one let's put a new layer in for layer four I'm just going to drag it below 5 because it makes sense let's see how well it works now we probably have a little bit better control over our surface now and the smoothing probably still works quite nicely eyelids take time they take a lot of time and again I'm not going to you can see where that there's not enough mesh here it's giving me these edges I'm not going to worry about that what I want to do is I want to try and build up the edge of that eyelid and get at the shape and form that I want at a density level that's really quick and easy to work with and and get it clean last thing we want is an eyelid that looks like what I have right now which is a wobbly mess so it's going to take a bunch of work I'm doing a negative with my wax right now I'm just going to clean that up you can see with a little bit of delicate work you can start getting a thin edge going and of course getting at the right shape and everything else is going to take some time and working with it to be able to get that to build up the way you want get this nice overlap going in the corner figuring out your bone structure here and again we could just might have the wrong overall sort of form happening to begin with to get our I laid the right shape correct the form at a lower level before you actually start trying to do the detail level and pushing it up and you'll find that it it works much easier at that point so it at a four maybe on the five we can start doing fun or detail we can certainly start thinking about you know finer details and then in the mouth area now and think about you know trying to pull that mouth up will give them a big bottom lip let's say and again so I might be up at a five but it looks like I can still smooth pretty good to be able to get the shape and form going I'm going to get a laugh line going down the corner of the face here it looks like I might need to adjust my preference is level change tolerance I think goes up to speed it up yeah so level change tolerance up just to speed up my UI and again I'm going to try and smooth that you'll see it might be hard to smooth so what if I go down one level smooth it at the four and then go back up to my level five to continue sculpting if I wanted so you can skip back up and down to be able to get that smoothing if you're smoothing isn't sort of working on a coarse enough level go to a coarser level to do the smooth and get it smooth at one level and then do the smooth again at the higher level if you want to smooth it out see this little pucker mark something to note that's where the mesh has got this weird try point now they're all quads your meshes need to be quads in in sculpting for them to subdivide nicely but what they have left in this default is this point here which is really bad the terms of sort of the base model scum sculpt in a sense the base model topology layout and you'll always end up with little pucker marks there you're always going to end up with a little pucker mark on the end of the nose or in the cheek here and we can probably get rid of those because those fine details as they was we start getting finer and finer details might just be lost in the skin texture and everything else of your character especially if it's a dinosaur or something where it's very very rough but even in a subtleties of a female face it'll start to become less apparent and the final result might be a normal map placed onto a lower res mesh so what we can use some you know just blurring brushes in Photoshop or whatever else to be able to clean that up and get rid of it so this is starting to get us you know a mesh that's working we could sculpt the eyes if we want you could build them in Max or Mayan and import them using file import send them over there's also the send to commands I'm not amusing max 2015 in Mudbox 2014 so I can't use the send to commands at the moment but there's the send to max and it will send it back and forward to the like versions of Max and Maya so that's very handy it just fires the meshes from one to the other whatever selected right now I'm having to export an import to be able to get it to function better between the two so now you might want to do some rendering and just and just check out your rendering and take a look what it looks like a bit better let's take a look at a few materials sorry over here we can throw a you know a different material on and play with maybe more of a clay material and once you're into a material we can edit material right click Edit material and it's strange it opens the dialog box with it and it puts it into properties so it puts it up in both places and we can play with the values in here and play around with the colors that are adjusting what that material looks like to get the material look now you might also want a little bit of ambient occlusion in there over to our viewport filters we can turn on a couple one cavity ambient occlusion it's nice it does the finer cavity lines and we can you know adjust the strength for that sample radius to smooth it out and we'll tell it to be best as far as quality goes and it will give us this viewport AO pass on there or cavity pass on it there's an ambient occlusion which really slows things down but again you can adjust the amount of casts up depending on your video card it allow you cast length and this is a sort of a softer bigger area and you know you can come up with it play with your fades and everything else and blur radiuses and you can get your nice AO pass going on it and be able to do screen grab so I'm going to do some screen grabs on this and we can go in to save screen image and in save screen image the best thing to do it doesn't anti-alias the edges so when you go to comp it together you're going to see that around the edges it's all aliased so best thing to do is grab it at twice res at least or even four times res save the image out and save that image out as a PNG file with an alpha and what you can do is you can then combine those together and create you know a create a nice you know image of it from that solution and again probably fastest way to get to it here if I just go into say save image again here is so here's a comped one that was screened grabbed right out of Mudbox of a character head that I created and I started this head with a sphere that's all it is is a sphere the hair was a sphere the eyes are spheres the entire head is a sphere the mustache and beard were quick objects just using the retopo tools same with the eyebrows in in max where I just did a quick retopo sculpt shape did an extrusion on it and poured it back to Mudbox for sculpting to get those shapes in there one thing Mudbox isn't very good at doing is is building new shapes new interesting shapes and forms so there's lots of other sculpting tools and lots of other things that you can do in here but there's the basics of getting yourself started and starting to build a sculpt

Channel: paul neale

Views: 9,816

Keywords: Paul Neale, Autodesk, Mudbox, Sculpting

Id: x0acdRG0bZw

Length: 45min 9sec (2709 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 29 2014