Tuesday 24 November 2009

The Pains Of Modeling

I'm not even sure whether I'm spelling modeling right. If I keep spelling it wrong, I apologize. It's just my rebellious way of showing how much I "love" modeling.

Okay, I have hit quite a few 3 Dimensional barriers today. Trying to get Minnie into a good state to rig has proved to be more difficult then I thought. Her arms and legs have continued to be stubborn, and me and Tom have made a huge effort to try and find ways around this problem.

Here's a pic that illustrates one way we tried to solve our issues.


We tried using a default human body to replace the arms and legs, but as you can see, it really didn't suit her! She looks kinda like a sumo wrestler here. Also, the rest of the default body was inside the round body I had already made for her. It was basically one mass covering another. I knew that this was surely going to cause problems when it came to rigging.

Another thing we tried was exporting the Mudbox object and add the arms and legs on Maya, in the form of cylinders and cubes. However, I realized that we had the same problem as before; The cylinders were not joining to the body mesh.

The next thing I've been trying is extruding faces of the body's mesh to make arms and legs (in Maya). I am now smoothing off and sculpting the results of this in Mudbox. This seems to have made a vast improvement on Minnie's limbs.

Here's a shot of what she looks like at the moment.

She's been chopped in half so she can be mirrored later on.

Another problem I think I'm going to have is doing the texturing. I've tried texturing Minnie in Mudbox, which seemed very straight forward at first. Here's how she looked once I had painted her.

I had a go at importing this body with the textures into Maya, but when I rendered an image of the mesh, the paintwork didn't show up. I'm not sure whether this was due to an error I made in the settings on Maya or Mudbox, or whether this is an actual problem which will affect whether I will be able to texture Minnie or not.

For the time being, I am going to concentrate on finishing the modeling and beginning the rigging.

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