Dinobird: Painting and Normals

Today I have painted in the rest of the textures (minus the tail which is only roughly done at this point) and created a normal map so that the feather and beak appear more detailed.

Normal map made in Photoshop using the NVIDIA Photoshop plugin

 

 

Dinobird: Painting

The face so far, for now this will be the base detail. Later I will work into this in areas like the mouth crevices. The eye here is just a texture and I will be adding textured spheres to fit under the eyelids.

I then added feathered detail to the main body, next I will add scale-like skin to the stomach and under the tail in the same blue colour as around the eye.

Dinobird: Sorting Out UV's

Today I have had a lot of issues with Mudbox starting from the retopology tools not working (I would select a target poly count etc and Mudbox would process the retopology process however the end result would very clearly not be retopologised as the poly count and layout would remain identical as though it had just been duplicated. I also had issues with importing UV's not replacing the Mudbox generated UV's, this appears to be due to a slight UV overlap which has since been fixed however the version of Mudbox on the university machines still has issues with retopology and I still can't access the mudbox community or use the image browser so I will be doing the majority of texture painting using my copy of Mudbox 2015.

In Roadkill I cut out the UV's and adjusted them so all were selected

In Maya I then relaxed and used 'layout' so the UV's fit the UV space more effectively

Painted in some flat base textures, when I can use the image browser I will be able to get a better effect

Dinobird: Detail update

Added more detail to the model by adding feathers by creating a stamp using the image below.

I also edited the eye to look more like a reptile using the following image for reference

Dinobird Progress

 

 

I have been looking at the structure of wings such as where the bones are, the arangement of the feathers and how the feathers sit when the wings are in different poses such as being folded. The bottom image is particulary helpful as it outlines the base shape required in the geometry and shows where overlaps are on a folded wing which will be the pose of my model. I may redo the wings in a way that would allow me to animate them to realistically relfect the folds of a birds wings since this would be an interesting study of anatomy and would be good practice for making game ready models.

 

Today I altered the geometry to match the reference images better, I will need to find a feather stamp to add the details of the feather in, alternatively I could create my own feather stamp in Photoshop however I will need to watch some tutorials first to ensure less mistakes.

Dare to be Digital

Over the previous week I have been working on concepts for my team - The Toasted Wellingtons Dare to be Digital pitch

Promo art

Possible enemy. Chose the king vulture as it is from South America and is depicted in ancient Mayan art

 Here is our pitch video: http://youtu.be/mJYJP_vupas

Dinobird

Been struggling with the model of the house so I've decided to take a break and do a Mudbox sculpt of a creature. As I did a camel last time I thought I'd try something different and make something from my imagination. I thought I'd make something avian so started with the Mudbox T-Rex model, removed its arms in Maya and bridged the gaps. I then made a wing model in Maya using this image for reference on how the wing would fold: http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs4/i/2005/141/4/b/Folded_Bird_Wings_by_keaalu.jpg

I was half thinking of making a more bat-like pterodactyl wing but thought a feathered wing would contrast better with the hard surface of the face.

Sculpted into the wings in Mudbox.

The wings aren't finished at the moment and need more working into

Texturing and crashing

Been having issues texturing the building. Realised I have over complicated things for myself so I will rebuild the tower using two cylinders which will be cylindrical mapped and scaled then duplicated and resized. While doing this Maya crashed so I decided to do a quick Mudbox sculpt of a hollow log for a change of scene. The textures used look fine however my UV's weren't right. Unfortuantly Maya crashed before I could get a decent screenshot of both.

 

Mudbox has also crashed on me on patching a hole left by retopologising.