Mudboxing the Pumpkins

This past week, I brought the pumpkins into Mudbox to paint some hi-res maps. I'm very pleased with the results.

Here's the low poly base mesh. Keeping things low poly has made modeling blendshapes and other rigging tasks much easier. It also makes for a super-fast animation environment.


Here's the model with a basic Maya polySmooth. It'll stay turned off while I'm animating, and I'll set the subdivision levels differently for different render layers. Level 1 should suffice for shadow casting. Level 3 for the character layer, etc.


Here it is with the normal map:


For the fine detail, I ended up layering a bump map on top of the normal map. I generated the base texture procedurally in Maya, baked out a file texture, and touched it up in Mudbox.


And here it is fully rendered with the color and specular maps, a combo of Mudbox and Photoshop work.


I think it's cool to see the progression from base mesh to rendered pumpkin.

I'm really happy with how the character turned out, and I'm psyched to start churning out some rough renders of some of the shots.

It was great to finally get a chance to dive into the Mudbox workflow - getting the models and maps in and out of Maya and Photoshop. I'm looking forward to using it more. Hopefully I'll have some Mudbox related Tips of the Week in the near future.