Let the free time commence!

so yeah...I'm posting a lot less now that university is done for the year, I've been out enjoying myself with friends a lot and generally having a great time

In between the fun I've been trying to get a bit of work done, I've mostly been working with Mudbox as it is an amazing program that can produce some amazing pieces of work...but I'm not very good at it. It may be my lack of traditional art skills or maybe I just need to get used to all of the tools and tricks of Mudbox... but at the end of the day a bit of practice will help.

So first I took the basic human male mesh that comes with Mudbox and then tried sculpting onto that adding muscle definition using the Classic Human Anatomy by Valerie Winslow. I had some problems with getting the general form right, starting with the base mesh I found it more difficult to move the mesh around to get the shape right, for example I struggled with the shoulders and arms as I wanted to add a bit more muscle to them areas.

Never the less this took about an evening to do, I was quite pleased with some bits, others not so much, but it was still fun to make...

Another thing I decided to work on was a gun, something common in games which I still haven't gotten round to making since I moved over to art this year. I started making it in 3DS Max using a side on view of a M4 Commando and then took it into Mudbox to sculpt on to. The modelling took about an evening and the sculpting took around 3 hours. I set myself a poly limit of 1000 and it ended up being 1044 polys, so close enough...

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out in the end and proved to be very useful for improving my hard surface sculpting which I didn't really know how to do. After playing around with different techniques for about an hour I managed to find a way which worked for me so I stuck with that for the remainder of the project.

I intend to keep working on fast projects like this so that I can improve my work speed as well as practice lots of different techniques while I have the free time. Very soon I'll be beginning work on the 3rd year major project to get a good head start on that, so I will have some more complete works then.