In the few days since my last belated blog post I feel like I've accomplished quite a bit.
The first thing that I did was export all 59 of the objects that comprise the body of my Juggler. I divided up the pieces that go directly into Modo and those that need some sculpting in ZBrush, then broke the ZBrush bound objects that will require polygroups up into quick select sets. I then brought the objects that require no additional sculpting into Modo and began texturing them:
I gave many of the objects a bronze texture, as that will be the dominant material for the sculpture. Then I began selecting individual items to texture differently. All of the objects will be some kind of metal except the light bulb and the vase, which are glass. Right now, in addition to the bronze objects, I have a brass pencil and post it notes; a steel keyboard and clock hands; silvery cords, scissors, CD, bulldog clip, tea ball, knife blade, and whisk wires; a cast iron frying pan and tire; and a green-tinted metal stapler and a red-tinted metal lamp shade. I'm currently attempting to make the plugs in the outlet that makes up a portion of the hand an etched silver, but to get it to work properly I'm going to need to UV the model first:
You can see how oddly the texture is behaving without UVs...
Here are two fully textured objects that I am particularly proud of:
In fact, I'm so proud of them that they have now been added to the "portfolio" section of this website. I was also recently introduced to a unique way to get Modo to render something nearly equivalent to a wireframe, so I have applied this method to the scissors to get the "wireframes" shown above.
After my texture work I brought the rest of my OBJs (as well as the ones that I'd already put into Modo, for reference) into ZBrush. It looks like my quick select sets became polygroups just like I wanted, and everything's positioned just right:
I can't wait to start sculpting!
Last, but not least, I moved onto my creature. I layed out some muscles and major wrinkles and then began sculpting them. I'm in the middle of refining those elements (which are currently all a bit exaggerated), and then I will move on to skin details, pose him, and add the hood and carapace.
Just because I'm excited, I'm posting a new image early:
I finished my first piece that required additional "sculpting": the phone model. I made some black and white graphics and fitted them to the UVs, made them an alpha in ZBrush, displaced them, had a bit of trouble generating a nice normal map but finally got it working thanks to Maya's transfer maps function, and then applied the normal map and the basic bronze material of my Juggler in Modo to come up with this:
Yay!