The next assignment, in extend to last one, requires me to transform the bixi thinggie to a set of weapons. It is actually up to me to do how many of them. I went to a family trip during new year break, in the middle of production, which was inevitable :p. Rather than rush it to the end, I and my professor agree that I will take the time to polish one weapon to perfect.

Let’s go back to some earlier sketch:

The whole bixi thing is a laser pod. The canons are embedded into a monument and stood at the back of the bixi shell. The end result will be sth like this:

 and this…

Thanks to an art history trip happened shortly before this, I got some insight of the canon body pattern.

General process. From the previous assignment, I got some idea on the workflow. And this time I want to further explore different ways of working, including actually sculpting the surface and making use of bump map for the detail. The bigger middle ring with sandy surface is actually sculpted with a mask image. The flower motif medelions are made with bump map. Obviously bump map look a lot better :p

Last time Kevin did a great job on his jade pillar. I think I can give it a try too. Why not? I put a dragon at the mouth of the canon. The sculpting was so much fun. I was on fire.

And the result of the whole thing:

Very quickly proceed to the monument and bring the whole thing together. I was kind of having trouble on the lighting. Last time I was using object based lighting for the bixi texture. But this time didn’t. When I bring them all together, the bixi part was extremely dim. The lighting utility in mudbox is quite primitive. It took me sometime to figure out how to brighten the lower bixi, while not over lightening the upper shinny canon.

ENOUGH MUDBOX! NEXTTIME! ZBRUSH FINALLY!

I am modelling the foundation with Maya still, feeling more controlled with that.

SEND TO MUDBOX yeah. oh no. problems. Time to clean up. I might need to correct my way of modelling somehow.

How is it look like in Mudbox, and final results. I should not say Mudbox is an easy tool. But it is extremely easy to start with. The interface is pretty much intuitive. It has photoshop layering mechanic. We worked together in the lab one night. Everybody are their first time with the tool. Everybody share what they got. And the other day everybody were happy. The body texture is imitating some kind of rough granite.

Finally the monument at the back. The characters are actually sculpted with the mask tool and an image as stensil! not BUMPED!

I did not make it to the weapons and laser pods. Let’s leave it to a later assignment which i will make weapon.

Can’t believe I complete the production in just two days, including learning the tool!

final render:

After a bit of extruding, scaling and finally putting the “rod” to lattice deformer. Yay there you go!

Lattice deformer is extremely handy to create organic form after you have the basic form. The only thing I am worrying about is the faces may have crossed by each other if the distortion is over while i am not paying attention.

While I am kicking off my unwrapping journey, ultimately unwillingly, Melissa brought us interesting tool to look at: the Mudbox. As the assignment did not specify any restriction on method. why not try sth new! I am always happy to hv potential shortcut.

This is insane. I felt like the effort we put in early quarters in texturing with photoshop were wasted. Of course the case is not like that. But this painting way and the brushes are just too easy. Mudbox even has an interface similar to photoshop, particularly the layer part, but in 3D. I KNOW! THEY ARE ALL JUST TOOLS!