progress

first off apologies for the lack of posting this month. up until a couple of weeks ago i was working on my dissertation and since then i have been using Maya and zBrush to do the following things.

i have been experiemtning with binding in maya. the results went well and as soon as i can figure out how to export the results as a movie i will. however below are some images.




i have also been working on the mesh in zbrush. the below images show my work flow up until now. i have been using an anatomy book for reference; attempting to keep the muscles anatomically correct and natural looking. as you can see i have changed the character to a male soldier and have been working from said anatomy book and pictures of medieval recreationists from the internet as well as taking inspiritation from fantasy books.



one method i found worked well is hiding parts of the geometry in zbrush so as to allow me to focues on the part of the body on which i am working.






the above images show the final stages of sculpting. below you can see the mesh alomst finnished. only the eyes and clothes have to be added as well as a little more detailing on the face.


i then went on to add clothes using the topology tools. this enables me to place points on the surface of the mesh and then combine these points into a second mesh for later manipulation. below you can see the process of creating the trousers.


below is the mesh as it stands now. the trousers and surcoat were made using topology but the shoe (which will be later duplicated and reversed for the other foot) was made using Maya. i exported a low res version of the mesh as an obj file before importing it into Maya and modeling a poly cube around the characters left foot. i then exported this back into zBrush for further modeling.

Maya stuff

I have recently been working on my basic human shape in Maya. I have been extruding faces before scaling rotating and moving them into position in order to obtain a rough human form. I have also added edge loops at the joints and face to aid adding detail and movement at a later date.


When I had completed this I duplicated the mesh and then combined them before merging the vertices in the centre together. However when I exported this mesh into zBrush I encountered an annoying problem. As soon as I subdivided the mesh a seam appeared down its centre where the meshes where combined.

This caused me a lot of headaches for a while until I went back into Maya in order to edit the original mesh. Before duplicate the first half of the body I simply selected the inside faces and deleted them. After duplication I merged the vertices exported the mesh as an obj file and upon subdividing the mesh in zBrush no seam appeared.

Although I have been working from a tutorial it makes no effort to talk through the modeling process in Maya and all of the methods of modeling and selection as well as duplication I had to teach myslef; it is only the physical form of the mesh that the tutorial helped me with.