The next task in the Mudbox to Maya series was to make the Alien Body along with the head. Much like the head I started off in Mudbox with the human body preset. I used the tools to conform the body into a weirder more alien like shape, from previous experience I knew I didn't want to go overboard with this so I kept things simple. I used the subdivisions to help with the detailing, I did all of my deforming on Level 0 and then went up to level 5 to add in the textures as not to change the topology, as I found out that Mudbox doesn't like that. Another thing to note it that I originally had very large shoulders on my alien but due to extracting textures and the low poly model I did have to lessen them if I wanted the textures to look somewhat decent around the shoulders. It's also because I was limited to level 0 when modelling.
I did end up changing the textures down the line after some baking testing but they are relatively the same. Anyway, as you can see I slimmed down the waist and calves and expanded the thighs and chest area. I planned on removing the head later in Maya as before I had tried to delete it before texturing and when I went to extract the textures the UV was messed.
I then extracted the textures from Mudbox and then sent them over to Maya with the low poly body. I first tested to see what the textures would look like as a normal bump map. I made the bump map in a tangent space to help smooth it out. However, the textures have lines where the colour tone changes due to the UV I'm assuming. Another issue I found was that the front especially shows the outline of the imprinting tool. This was blended in Mudbox but it seems that the textures don't sit quite as well in Maya.
Although I am somewhat please with how it turned out ( it could have gone much worse) I was still hoping that the map would come through a bit more and show off the detailing. The legs are one major area where the textures didn't show up, compared to the Mudbox version where you can clearly see the imprints.
I went back over to Mudbox to paint the model to try and make it look better, and I did paint the head separately as well in my other post.
I think the body looks so much better once painted and in Mudbox, the different greens and browns bring it together and hi-light the textures. Overall I am not very happy with how the body turned out. It could have been worse but it also could have been better. This was my third time using Mudbox and transferring over maps, we also got less guidance with this task so I struggled quite a bit. UV maps and textures were never my strong suit. But I still have learned from this task as I did make multiple attempts to transfer over the normal map from Mudbox into Maya. Instead of baking in Maya (every attempt I've made without help has resulted in a crashed Maya) I extracted the normal Map in Mudbox and imported them and the low poly model over. It did sort of save time, I had to rebuild my alien body due to me moving topology on every level and realising I cant do that If I want to extract the map. It has been a learning process and I now know how to move models and textures from Mudbox into Maya.
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