Monday, October 11, 2010

Alien Sculpt

Finally got motivated to spend some time working in Mudbox. I figured out how to get around some of the limitations of my tablet that were frustrating me (screen to tablet ratio and pressing the stylus buttons) and started messing around. I started with a basic human head shape that is supplied with Mudbox. While deep down inside I feel like that's cheating, I have to remind myself that it's better to produce something that wasn't quite down from scratch than to produce nothing. It's like using a cake mix to prevent starvation. Okay, not really.
I read an interesting article recently about perfectionism and procrastination that I really identified with. Basically it was saying that for fear of not getting it exactly right, one tends not to start it at all. That's the reason I don't have a website yet. But back to the sculpt, this is a WIP (i.e. it's nowhere near finished) of some kind of alien.



And a bit further along:

It's really fun, once I got past some of my mental and hardware obstacles. With sculpting, the best approach is to start with quite low resolution, and block out the basic shapes, then add resolution and start refining the shapes and adding other features. Then add more resolution and start including other details. Finally at the highest resolution, texture and blemishes are added in. The software allows you to jump back down to lower resolution versions to make larger scale changes (while stil retaining the detail), but the less I have to do that, the better the result I think.
Happy to hear your comments. If it looks like it's from some specific movie, it's not. Sorry if it looks like something from Star Trek or Star Wars or Mass Effect, this was just out of my head and seeing what my pen would produce. No reference or initial sketches, which is typically not a good idea, but this is more like doodling... getting familiar with the tools and practicing.

No comments:

Post a Comment