Crocodile progress and looking forward.

I've been working on geometry on my Crocodile and have changed a few things, added a few things and still have some stuff to finish up.  First off as you can see from the picture below there are a lot rectangular faces and no loops around the mouth.  

I've gone in and evened out the geometry for better results while sculpting and added the loops for the mouth for better deformations.  I've also added some geometry in the mouth and ridges along the back along the tail.  After talking to Frank I was convinced that I should add geometry for those larger ridges (not on the tail) as opposed to sculpting them in.  Next I'll have to mirror what I've done, fix the UV's create eye geometry and then I'll continue on to the laborious task of texturing and sculpting.  I'm thinking this is going to be one of the tougher texture jobs I'll have to do...

Cat Finished

Alright... I got all the problems worked out for renders and now the main issue is the amount of time it takes to get the renders done.  I've got this basic one finished and I've been batch rendering for a demo real since Sunday.  Now I'm going to continue with the Crocodile.

Done... Almost...

From my last post I've changed my direction of fur to armor plated skin, kinda like that of a rhinoceros.  I would have posted earlier but I got sucked into getting the new direction fleshed out.  I may decided to revisit the idea of some fur in the future but right now, based on my schedule and what Frank has said, I need to focus on the feasibly attainable things I am already familiar with.

As of right now this project is supposed to be finished.  I've been doing some heavy texturing and sculpting and gotten it pretty much finished for where I want it in regards to color and specularity and surface details.  After talking with Frank I changed some things with geometry structure, particularly in the head. I've also created different eye geometry and a texture for a more realistic looking eye.  However I'm having issues with rendering in Maya and getting results to come out the same as in Mudbox.  

As shown in the last image the bumping is turning out pixilated and blocky.  I am researching and going over better mudbox to maya work flow tutorials to work out those issues.  It seems like I'm going to have to run over a little bit on time.  Probably just for the weekend though as I'm mainly going to be focusing on rendering and maybe a little bit of polish and tweaking that I see fit.  As soon as thats done, hopefully by Tuesday, I'll be moving on to my next project, the crocodile.  

Overall in terms of working hours, I haven't been keeping close track of how much work I've put in so far.  Partially because I have started and stopped working on the project in between classes and doing other class work.  I can say I've put in a few late nights in the labs and at home which if I estimate those late nights by themselves would probably be 24 hours of work.  Other times between classes I would probably estimate between 16 and 18 hours.  Meaning I'm running between 40 and 42 hours of work so far.  assuming my estimates are correct of course...

Starting Texturing Woes

I'm having some issues trying to decide how to texture this current project.  So I decided to re-look at my original idea of this character.   I figured I do this to revisit some of the ideas and reasons for why one texture might work better than another.  I played with painting colors in mudbox but it didn't feel like I was going exactly where I wanted for the creature.

When I first approached this character I felt like combining a bunch of elements from things that I was particularly interested in.  I felt like creating some sort of a marine cat like creature hence the tail.  At the time I was also interested in creature designs from the movie Avatar.  So I took some influence from the Thanator in particular the almost armor plated and very well defined musculature.

However I didn't want to take too much from the Thanator and make a completely alien so I compromised for a thick leather plating like back and a stronger wider body structure.  This is also why I took reference from real cats like lions, leopards, and panthers.  I chose these three is because the hair on lionesses, leopards and panthers shows more form.  Also I was still interested in a more tree like jungle cat as that is also somewhat like the Thanator again.  A similar environment to consider would be like around the Amazon river.

This gave me an idea coloring along with looking at how marine mammals and big cats are colored.  As a lot of cats are colored for camouflage I decided to use the color of the silt in the amazon and basic patterns from tigers and leopards as well as darker coloring on the top side and lighter coloring on the bottom.  For the back plating looked at some rhino skin references to get a better idea for how to texture the back plating.

However my problem now is to decide whether I want to add fur or not.  I have done some playing with basic fur attributes and they done look horrible but they aren't refined enough for what I want.  If I decide on using fur its going to require further research into much more advanced fur techniques.  

Other problems I've having is transferring work back and for between Mudbox and Maya.  Whenever I bring texture back from mudbox as extracted textures the bump maps change and lose definition and the painting layers wont export as one flattened file despite selecting options telling it to do so.  I'll have to do some searching to solve these issues.

Beginning Sculpting Ventures

I've gone ahead and ventured into playing with some sculpting.  Part of this venture was to get used to Mudbox again and the other part was to be looking at musculature and how to I want to do the details.  Part of the research I've done for editing on the geometry has come in handy so here are the references I've gone and found.  More in depth sculpts to come.

Cat Geometry Update

I've been working on trying to get my first revisited piece back up to speed in order to progress forward. I've been working with my cat model and noticed that there were a number of issues in respect to unnecessary geometry definitions, unwanted 5 sided faces, 6 pole vertices and a little more geometry needed in the neck. I had to go back to an older lower rez version of my model to fix those issues.  For awhile I was worrying about trying to get geometry to flow with musculature but this project is going to be geared a little bit more towards animation modeling so I'm leaving the geometry as is so I can sculpt in muscle and other details.  I  completed re-UVing the model.

I also changed a couple things in the in order to make the creature appear to possibly have a more accurate bone structure. Most notably changes were in the shoulders and the hips, though I raised geometry a little bit in the toes as well.  As is I'm going to progress forward with sculpting and texturing unless something comes to my attention in the geometry that needs more revisiting.

UPDATE:
 After talking with frank more I've done more editing on the geometry.  Which also caused me to redo the UV's.  The way I've arrange the new UVs actually groups like body parts together.  Hopefully this is the last time I have to UV.