I'm James Taylor back with part 2 of our Mudbox character creation tutorial.
This video will focus on revisions - an extremely important aspect of the creative process,
that every artist has to deal with. So we have a boss or a client or a teacher that requests changes,
and we need to know how to fit that into our workflow, without starting over from scratch.
Here's my guy from where we left off last time, and I'm going to make some big changes.
First, I want to change his posture, so that he looks more menacing.
Second, I want to change his forearms and his hands, so he has some big claws. So basically, I want him to end up looking like this:
So what kind of changes do we need to make to make that happen?
Let's start with the easy changes first.
I'm going to make changes to this guy's posture.
Posture changes mean I'm changing the entire mesh,
that can be difficult to do at a high level of sculpt detail. I'll step all the way down to my lower subdivision levels,
I'll add a new sculpt layer, and I'll start reshaping my guy on that sculpt layer.
And working on a sculpt layer is great, because I can turn it on and off, and do a before/after comparison.
And whenever we are showing revisions to whoever has requested our revisions, like our teacher or our boss,
it really helps to show that before/after, so they can see very explicitly the changes that you made.
Now this process is very similar to the block-out process. I'm using my Grab brush to make changes,
and I'm working at low resolutions for as long as I can.
I'm only stepping up to higher subdivision levels when it's absolutely necessary. So when it's time to add detail that isn't visible on lower levels,
then I step up to a higher resolution, so that I can start to grab and move those details around,
or smooth those details out, to get rid of them - whatever we're doing.
In this case, we see I'm using my Foamy brush to push in - to cut under the pecs, to make them pop out a little bit more.
So revising our sculpt is very much like the normal sculpting process, it follows that idea of progressive detailing
where we start with low resolution detail, and then we build up.
So adjusting the posture was easy, but now we want to make changes to the hand. And I will need a new base mesh,
that's just too much to do as sculpted detail. So I'm going to step down to level zero,
select my mesh, and send out to Maya or wherever modeling package we use.
Once I'm in Maya, I can change the mesh just like any other mesh.
So I want to give this guy those longer, claw-like fingers. I'm going to work with the geometry that's there,
I'm not going to add or subtract geometry, just to keep things simple. Really I'm just pushing and pulling points.
If you want to see a tutorial on modeling hands, you can see my video dedicated to the topic.
Once the hands are finished, I'll integrate them into the base mesh,
deleting the hands that are there, and putting the new hands on top.
Then I'll combine them all, and merge it. I do want take this time to double check my UVs,
to make sure that nothing is overlapping so that when I start the painting process, things will go well.
Ok, time to send this guy back to Mudbox. We do need to rename and because if we have duplicate object names,
the import will fail. I'll select him and send to Mudbox. In Mudbox, I can double check the object list,
to make sure I don't have any duplicate names. Then I'll hide everything except for the new guy that I just imported in.
Now it's time use Transfer Details. And Transfer Details is the way we transfer our sculpt detail from the original sculpt,
on to that new base mesh that I just built in Maya. Under the Mesh menu, Transfer Details is the last option.
And in the option box that opens, I need to select my source and my target models. My target model is my low res mesh,
and my source is my high res mesh.
There are a lot of other options here that we could play with, but we'll skip over those for now,
and just project, because we want to test the projection before we spend any time tweaking it.
The projection shows up, at first glance it does look like our model. Now, we're missing some detail in the hands,
no surprise there, because we changed the hands.
However, we can see that the horns didn't come over right, either.
Now the quickest way to fix this is to update our low res geometry so that Transfer Details projects better.
So I'll send a higher res guy back and into Maya, just so I can see the shape of the horns
I'll isolate those horns out, by just deleting everything else. Once those horns are in place, I'll go back to work on the low res mesh.
(that I was just editing, the one with the hands)
I'll change the horns on the low res mesh, to extrude out new horns. So when we originally built this guy, we used the Mudbox base mesh,
and there's no horns on the Mudbox base, so it has a hard time transferring details in that area. So I'll create a low res cage that matches that,
and when we transfer details on this new mesh, we'll get a much better result. So we send this guy back into Mudbox,
and we apply Transfer Details to him. We select him as our target mesh, the high res is the source mesh,
but now that we're sure that this transfer is going to work, let's look at some of these other options.
So Search Distance, right up at the top, is probably the most important.
This one is the threshold that controls how far Mudbox will look to find sculpt detail.
And if our high res mesh, our source model, is much bulkier than our target model,
we probably need to raise the search distance up, so that we can find that detail.
So when using Transfer Details, we're almost always going to be looking in our advanced options section.
And generally, I like to turn on 'Test Both Sides', to make sure that we get all the detail we can.
Transfer Sculpt Layers is another import one. We generally want to keep this one on,
that means that we will have all the sculpt layers that were present on the original high res model.
those will be transferred over to the low res. The only reason we might turn this off, is to optimize scene size, and make it easier to use our object.
And the last option, Transfer Base Detail as a Sculpt Layer, can be useful.
That means that any detail that's not on a sculpt layer will be placed on its own sculpt layer on the new transfer detail mesh.
This can be useful because you're able to use the Erase or Mask tools to hide that detail after it transfers.
Ok - now I hit Start Transfer button, things transfer over, and we see, this time, we still have the same errors on the hands. Again, expected.
Now this time we see that the horns have come over much more nicely. And we're finally at the point
where we can get back to making changes to our sculpt by finishing the sculpting on the hands.
I begin by getting rid of detail that is on the hand from the previous mesh,
I'll use my Erase tool, and we'll see this is where the Transfer Sculpt Layers comes in handy.
I can use the Erase tool to just get rid of that detail, and not have to do it the long hard way using the Smooth or Grab brushes.
And after I've removed that detail, it's time to reshape the hands, to make the forearms and the hands much, much bigger.
I'll try to use Mudbox's Joint tools, because I can quickly create a joint and scale and move it around,
the problem here, is this would give me the functionality I want, but we see that it doesn't mirror. So we have to do this by hand.
Just like at the beginning of video, I step down to a very low subdivision level,
I'll start to use my Bulge and my Grab brushes, and I'll just slowly build these areas up, so that I get the shape that I want -
these big monstrous claws. But I do it without creating overlaps or really puffy looking shapes,
and since I'm progressively adding detail, I only step to a higher subdivision level when I'm happy with the base shape.
So you see I'm creating Sculpt Layers and working on Sculpt Layers.
And the rest of the process is just like the first video - we're using a Wax brush and our Foamy brush to quickly create that muscle shape,
and we'll just add detail layer by layer, level by level, the same way that we did previously. So what comes next?
Now we start to look at adding very fine level detail: so skin texture, veins, muscle striations, stuff like that is in the next video.
Ok, this wraps up part 2, I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching!