Tesseract

December 03, 2018

In this task we had to make a Tesseract in Maya and Mudbox. And using stencils, add in the textures.

Firstly, I had a cube in Maya that I changed so that the edges would extrude around the centre of the cube. I just selected the faces and extruded outwards to make this effect.

The once this was done I exported it over to Mudbox as a OBJ files. The once in Mudbox I downloaded some stencils from a folder we were given and used them to imprint patterns onto each side of the cube. First though, we had to add in 5 sub division levels, on each level it would get more detailed and add in more sub divisions, then as you go up and down the layers you can see how it effects the cube.

For each side I imprinted I made a new layer in the side bar so it would be easier to manage. Then I wanted to made another imprint of a wheel on top of the one I had already done, I used the masking tool and a new layer to delete the imprint directly below the new stencil I wanted. Therefore, the new imprint would not clash with the one below and it would show up more.

The red area shows where the imprint below would be deleted. Once that was done and I placed the new imprint on top it looked like this.

To get the textures back in Maya we had to use an occlusion map and a normal map to get only the textures into Maya.

I first tried to put the texture on the cube as a bump map but I didn't like how that turned out, it looked too harsh and very different from the one in Mudbox. So I then had a go at Arnold textures and used that one instead so I could see what it would look like in the render view.

It did end up looking alot better in the Arnold render view, alot less harsh and more smoothed.

Overall I did find the process of imprinting the stencils onto the cube quite annoying as I couldn't get it to work at first and it took some fixing the settings and layers to get it going. I feel content with this model its not something I'm overly proud of but its also something I'm not embarrassed of. Although I did learn alot about Mudbox and occlusion maps as I had never heard of them before so it was interesting to see what I could do between Maya and Mudbox.