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Mudboxing stone

polycounter lvl 9
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Reverenddevil polycounter lvl 9
I was wondering if anyone had any tips or tutorials on sculpting rock or granite type of stuff in Mudbox? I am looking for workflows etc.. Thanks...

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  • Minos
  • Mark Dygert
    The old pillar tutorial is pretty good, its pretty straight forward when he gets to the sculpting. Most of it is "and then I'm going to do some detail like this" then you watch him futz with it for 20-30sec. There might be more specific tutorials out there, but really I think people who make great cliff faces and rocks in mudbox know more about rocks then they do about mudbox, so research and gathering ref should be mission 1.

    Don't forget to check out this thread, lots of good info in there.
    http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=50160

    The tutorial okkun posted is this: http://www.vigville.com/forum_images/2d1tuuf.jpg
    Its a little hard to follow along, but pretty simple, you take some boxes use the cut plane and extude/chamfer to get some interesting shapes. Optimize it a bit and bake it. You could toss in a sculpting pass after you get the shaped roughed in.

    If you make the switch to ZBrush (really great tools once you get used to the wonky interface) check this out: http://gnomonology.com/tutorial/255

    It's pretty straight forward and really easy to do. It "could" be adapted to Mudbox but there are a few ZB specific things he does that I don't think you can't do in Mud and you'd have to innovate or spend quite a bit of time doing some of it manually.

    Tips for Mud:
    - Pinch edges to create sharp edges.
    - For hair line cracks, sculpt in a trench, then take a pinch brush that's roughly 2x as wide and run it over the end, it will give you a nice hair line crack.

    Suggestion(s):
    - Not all rocks are the same, do some research on the type of rock you're making how it was formed, how it breaks down, how its used and why ect...
    - Gather metric tons of reference for those specific kinds of rocks.
    - For rocks start off with a quad sphere, not a regular sphere (regular spheres have tris and poles at the caps, makes for some nasty sculpting problems).
    - To make a quadsphere, simply take a box turbosmooth it, and apply spherify, or get this script that creates a quadsphere as a primitive shape: http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=823969&postcount=5
    - Apply noise, this will be big chunky detail.
    -Turbosmooth, apply another noise, this will be smaller details.
    - Export and sculpt.
  • PixelMasher
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    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    yea that ZB tut for the rock face is awesome, done by a guy from weta digital, the technique is pretty simple and easily applicable to some modular rock pieces.
  • pior
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    pior grand marshal polycounter
    If you use mudbox1, go to flatten tool, advanced options, and uncheck 'update plane'. It will greatly help you in getting flat sharp surfaces.
  • Brice Vandemoortele
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    Brice Vandemoortele polycounter lvl 19
    any tip on having that flatten option on 2009? this keeps me from switching...
  • pior
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    pior grand marshal polycounter
    Asked an autodesk rep/mud2009 demo guy at GDC, he had no clue, and didn't know it even existed originally. Yay!
  • Brice Vandemoortele
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    Brice Vandemoortele polycounter lvl 19
    Brilliant ! Thanks again Autodesk, what will they be screwing up next?
    go petitions, riots! ^^
  • funshark
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    funshark polycounter lvl 16
    pior wrote: »
    and didn't know it even existed originally. Yay!

    WTF!!!! lol ! :poly142:
  • Mark Dygert
    Yea something tells me communication between all of Autodesks many heads isn't exactly perfect...

    Technically the same company but if the guy didn't work on the Mudbox team he'd probably have no clue and maybe never met the team. The last Autodesk seminar I went too had the Maya and Max reps sitting right next to each other, and while demoing new features they would ask "does Max or Maya have something like this?" Someone even asked "shouldn't you know?" and they laughed and explained there was next to zero communication between the teams.
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    Yeah.. I can imagine that, but Pior said he was the mudbox demo guy :)
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