Hairball/Mudbox Sculpting
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Hairball/Mudbox Sculpting
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| I recently got a copy of Mudbox 2011 (and Maya 2011 and Max 2011 and XSI, etc.) through Autodesk's student/education thingamajig - basically, free student licenses for those who qualify. Anyhow, Hairball is just a sphere I gussied up with some faces and hair. And ears. Yes, faces is plural. You can view a turntable of it here. (Note: the video is a bit newer than the pictures and has AO enabled, so there are a few tiny differences.) On the front:  And on the back side:  I may or may not post more sculpting in here since I generally dislike starting threads. |
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| Did Eric Cartman imposing a retarded kid inspire you? :-) |
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| No, Michael Jackson and David Bowie did. Also sleep deprivation. |
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A short 10 minute sculpt. Noses are pretty hard to do. Edit: Looks kind of like Mel Brooks now that I think about it. Edit 2: I just discovered I can make videos in mudbox, so here's an initial test video that's kind of neat I guess: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/31892/woot.mov |
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Since I just tacked on a video to the end of the last post, I figured I'd add another one with a picture. That dude there is about 15 minutes or so, and there's a timelapse of the first ten minutes of work on it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwkXD6Q2AGA |
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| Very nice. |
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Forgot to post these earlier.   |
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| Hello. That last one is Puki, yes? Goodbye. Jes |
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Couple new ones.  |
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| Legendary work. A couple of questions- It looks like most of this is done using a 'raise/lower operation' with different brushes, is that correct? I notice often the detail you are adding in the video seems a lot finer than the size of the brush you're using in many instances. How so? This method seems inherently 'hi-poly'. Is there any way to use these models for games? |
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| This method seems inherently 'hi-poly'. Is there any way to use these models for games? Usually, a lower poly version of a model is refined in a sculpt tool to bake normal, displacement and ambient occlusion maps. That way the lower poly version with faked higher detail can be used in real-time applications. |
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Went a bit further with the first one. Painted it a bit, but I honestly am not too good with painting in Mudbox, so it's kind of crap. The sculpt itself isn't very detailed either, which probably isn't helping matters.  It looks like most of this is done using a 'raise/lower operation' with different brushes, is that correct? It's done using displacement painting, which I guess you can think of as raise/lower operations? I think you're probably over-simplifying exactly what goes on, though. There's more than just raising/lowering, there's also filling, scraping, cutting, flattening, smoothing, etc. that don't just raise/lower points (for example, I can use the grab brush and pull some chunk of a model away from it in a way that you cannot possibly describe in terms of a simple raise/lower operation). I notice often the detail you are adding in the video seems a lot finer than the size of the brush you're using in many instances. How so? Pressure sensitivity and falloff. I use a falloff very similar to a thumb tack (if you were to graph it) for most things, and the wax tool which has somewhat interesting behavior that I don't think I would ever call a simple raise/lower brush. I think most people would pull their hair out and break things if it filled the entire radius of the brush every time. I know I would. Is there any way to use these models for games? This is one method of making high resolution models for baking normal maps, AO maps, displacement maps, etc. for use in games. The vast majority of games you can buy now, with the exception of handheld stuff obviously, have art that is made using this sort of process. In my case, I'm not making these for baking, I'm just doing it because it's fun. This method seems inherently 'hi-poly'. The sculpt is just under 400,000 polygons right now, so it's really not that high-poly. Far as I know, this is quite a ways under the usual resolution of meshes used for sculpting (I could be wrong, I don't ever ask for polygon counts since they're completely irrelevant in this sort of thing..). |
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| Thanks for the detailed responses. Keep up the good work. |
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| Good stuff. To add to noel's post, yeah pretty much all AAA games you see today are modelled super high res and detailed with a process like this, then they just uv map the result onto a lower poly model, rather than decimate the high res mesh - in some cases I've seen them decimate the mesh and clean up polys by hand before applying the displacement mesh. In all cases, the high res model was needed to generate the displacement map. These days we're heading towards hardware tesselation and displacement, where the high res map generated from sculpting creates actual polys during rendering so we will only see more of this kind of technique. |
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School has started again, and that means I need an outlet for stress and such:   |
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| The trunk is really well done! I didn't try mudbox yet, as Blender had every sculpt feature I needed yet but it looks interesting. |
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| very good, the treeface and the skull esp. |
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