Week 9

So I have to admit, I havent done alot of mesh painting before, so i couldnt start on the high res models without picking a software package. I've been wanting to do this for a while, ever since I saw speed mesh painting on youtube. The dicision was between zBrush and Mudbox. Paul reccomended mudbox because as it was made by autodesk, it was intuitively much the same as Maya. I could see his point, but it was probably for this reason that I went with zBrush. Its a good thing to push your limmits and try something different now and then, and oh god . . . . push limmits is exactly what zbrush did. Its nothing like any 3D package I've ever used. Instead of a virtual space, the program behaves like a canvas, and instead of having items within that virtual space, you get "Tools" with which to paint onto that canvas. I still cant see the point in this, even after having learnet the program. It serves to do little more than alienate users if you ask me.

So the first thing i did was take the model I showed in week 7, It was modeled off Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, so I was confident that its proportions where anotomically correct. However this meant that (for the second time, grrrr) I disconnected it from the rig and lost the weight painting and positions. In retrospect, I could have saved myself alot of trouble by going straight to the mesh painting without having rigged the model first. By not doing this I'd taken the mesh into zbrush after having experimented with its animation, and resetting the neutral pose. This wouldnt be a problem, only the mesh I took into zbrush was symmetrical in topology, but the vertex positions where not. I dealt with this problem in week 10, and will post more details there.

So now I feel is the time to praise zBrush. For all the toruble I had getting over the learning curve involved with zbrush, once passed, I cant even describe. Modeling became fun again. I somehow assumed zbrsuh would be like the brush tool in maya, I was so wrong! Working with zBrush really is like sculpting. What I was complaining about earlier, with the head taking so much time, I could now do with ease and speed. My bamboo is suddenly so much more usefull. I feel like this is how I want to model from now on.

At the time the net was down, so I took a few photos and was able to start modeling. You'll notice that -as I mentioned before- the model had at this point lost symmetry especially at points furthers from the centre such as the arms and shoulder, so I didnt bother continuing to model with symmetry, and instead worked only on his right side.

So his body now had far more detail and muschle definition, and I'm happy with what zbrush has added to the model, and am confident that the bump maps should look good. Though theres still alot of work to be done on the model.