3D Evaluation

3D Evaluation

I really enjoyed working in 3D using the different softwares. I found there are many different ways to animate,render,model and texture. I looked at how the softwares worked alongside other external plugins and softwares. What I noticed is that its best to use the different softwares in conjunction with each other instead of trying to use just one. For example, When building characters it would not be sensible to use maya to create the meshes. Mudbox and other programs like Zbrush are a lot more tailor made for these specific purposes.
While using Mudbox I tried out a lot of new ways to add specific details to a mesh that might help deliver a more professional end product. For instance, when i created my female archer model I created a base meh for the hair and other objects like the bow in Maya and then imported them into Mudbox to sculpt them into more complete meshes.
I found mudbox to be very user friendly and it didn't take long for me to get into the swing of things. However I did stumble across a couple of negative points that i will point out about the software. While I was figuring out a way to gain more control of how the mesh is shaped in the base mesh stages so I could sculpt things like the hair I found that Mudbox doesnt really offer great control for this. Yes you can pull and stretch the mesh but then you are left  with a deformed mesh with geometry that is not uniform any more and sometimes will even start to break. Yes they give you a retopology option but that retpologises the whole mesh and in 90% of the times it will affect your hard work done previously to the mesh.
While looking online for a fix for this I seen that others were having the same problem and many more profeshional artists recommended moving on to Zbrush as it had more options available to the user. I downloaded the software and at first it was very daunting as the user interface was very complex to begin with. After a few hours playing around with it I came across the option "Dynamesh". This was exactly what I was looking for as you could just highlight the area of a mesh you wanted to add more geometry to and then click dynamesh. The software would then calculate and insert more polygons into the desired area. It even gave the user the control of the amount of geometry to be added. I was really impressed with the software.

One other thing I noticed with Mudbox is that when painting on high poly models sometimes the paint is not projected onto the mesh correctly and can show up on other areas of the mesh. For example, if i were to paint some color onto a characters leg the paint would also show up on the face and other areas. This was quite frustrating. I done a lot of looking online on how o fix this and I found that a lot of artists don't use the paint process in Mudbox but create textures that they can apply to the mesh in other softwares like Maya and 3DMax.
One thing I loved about Mudbox was the ability to export displacement and other maps straight into Maya. This gave me the ability to open just a low poly base mesh in Maya and then import the high poly displacement maps into Maya and apply them to the base mesh. i was amazed at how this was done i'm sure this is very useful as my characters mesh was up in the millions of polygons at the highest subdivision levels. i can only imagine how long it would take to render scenes with such large objects to be rendered.
Working in Maya this year also had its ups and downs when it came to figuring out exactly how to execute certain tasks. rendering my scene exactly how I wanted was something that took me days to learn how to get everything working exactly how it should. I noticed that my renders were turning out very dark when i batch rendered then but when I rendered them inside Maya's test render they looked fine. i messed around with the gamma settings, brightness and so on but could not get what I wanted. With enough time looking into it I came across the problem I was having. I notices that when I rendered the files as .png file types some information was lost and the image was coming out darker than normal. i tried out other formats and noticed that .exr performed quite well and didn't compress the image too much. .exr was able to hold much more information than the .png alternative.  I needed these formats over the more common jpeg as i wanted to render my scenes without the sky so needed some transparency.
Another issue i found is that when I wanted to add some grass using the paint effetcs tool I noticed that it would not render unless you converted all the effets to polygons in Mental ray. The grass would render in the built in Maya renderer though but I found this really annoying. I could have rendered the grass in Mayas renderer and the overlayed it inside Adobe After Effects or another software, but then that would introduce more things to be done like adding masks for any animation that will be in the scene. With my limited timeframe to complete the projected I opted out of using any 3D grass to using a hand painted 2D texture for the grass.
Over all my experience with both Mudbox and Maya has been very good and I really enjoyed both the software's. I feel that Maya is excellent though I feel like Mudbox however is maybe lagging behind when it comes to other software's used in the industry for sculpting.