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This tutorial is © COPYRIGHT by José María Andrés Martín (ALZHEM)
The total or partial reproduction of this tutorial by any means is prohibited to third parties without prior written authorization from José María Andrés Martín (ALZHEM)

FRUITY FLASH: Mrs Pear by Jose Maria Andres Martin is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Tittle: "FRUITY FLASH: Mrs Pear"
Approximated duration: 1-2 days
Software: MAX, UVLayout, y Mudbox


   Hi all :-)

   In this mini tutorial I'd like to show briefly how I modeled and textured Mrs Pear, apart from talk a bit about the teturing process in Mudbox. This character, as the strawberry, were originally scheduled for 2 days max. due to the tight deadline I set for it, so I planned to get them done in 2 days each: first day for geometry and UVs and second day for refining the geometry with Mudbox and textures with Mudbox and Photoshop.

   At the begining I was a bit scared of the time I had (I had to do these things, plus making the shaders, handbad, eyes, tongue, teeth, etc.) but was possible :-)

   I started the base mesh with a "lathe", controling the amount of polys.

    After some minutes working bearing on ming just the loops of the mouth (the eyes weren't important in this case and I was in a rush) I got something like this. Looks much fatter and static than the final model, but before any deformation with a "Blend" modifier and some modifications I wanted to leave more or less OK the geometry, and for that the more orthogonal the better :-)

   Arms and legs were heritated from the strawberry, with some modifications. For the hands of the strawberry and the pear I modeled and rigged a basic hand to get quick poses. You can see in the following image how the hands are still not welded to the arms.

    Once the base model is done, "Bend" and welding included, the geometry was like this.

    You can see it's subdivided now. This subdivision was done to make easy the attachment of arms and legs to the body.

   At this point, with the mesh being simply correct, it's time to do the UVs. For this there is nothing better than UVLayout.
UVLayout is a bit weird to use, and its interface is a bit "medieval", but it relaxes better that a foam bath. After a session of "cut-relax" the UVs were like this. Nothing perfect, but well enough thinking the final product was an image and Photoshop can always help us to fix little imperfections and seams.

    So... here finishes the first day. Let's go to sleep tight because it's 5:30 am already, hahaha :-)

   The second day starts importing this object with right UVs to Mudbox and refining the mesh. Mudbox 2009 has the skills to manage massive amounts of polys quite easily, so the pear was subdivided around 5 million polys to get enough definition to generate a good 4K normals map.

   Basicaly, apart from general deformations, the main details are the little bump of the skin and the detail of the lips. Here you can see a "before" and an "after" of the process.

    At this moment is good to extract the normal and/or displacement maps because sometimes, after texturing, the files are too heavy to do things easy and quick..

   To generate the normal map Mudbox is extrelly easy. Basically we select the object we want...

    ... we go to the upper menus, click on "Maps", "Extract Texture Maps", and... we select whatever is shown there... and if I say that is because right now Mudbox doesn't want to start... cool :-P

   Once there, in my case, I chose "Normal Map" because that's the only thing I wanted to get, clicked on "Use Selected" in the "Target Model" to specify we want with the low poly version of that object, and "Add Selected" in "Source Models" to indicate the details should be got from there. The value for "Search Distance" should be automaticly displayed, but if is not we can click on "Best Guest" and this way we'd get it. And... only select  the size of the map (4K for Mrs Pear as the render was going to be quite big (5000x3500)) and press "Extract". In a few seconds we get a quite right normal map.

   Here you can see the parameters I used. No complications.

    The extracted map was this:

    So... the last step in this tutorial is to create the texture for Mrs Pear.

   The easiest way to make the texture without any worry about seams, etc. is with the tool "Projection" in Mudbox. We only have to look for a nice image to be used as a "Stencil" and paint, paint... I made these two textures in Photoshop for that purpose.

   To make it work select the tab "Paint Tools", and there click on "Projection":

    It'll say we need a "Stencil", so in the in the bottom-right part of the interface select the tab "Stencil" and add one (click on ">" and "Add Stencil")

    Once chosen it'll be shown in the center of the screen.

    Stencils can be moved, rotated or scaled with the shortcuts shown on the left of the screen:

    Once we have the geometry and the stencil where we like, just click to start painting. Once we do that we first get a pop up window asking for the resolution of the texture (I chose 4K again) but after defining this and click on the "OK" button we start painting.

   And... paint, paint!

    To keep a good control while we paint, and avoid being destructive, it's always good to work with layers. To make a new layer we click on the "New Layer" button (up-right of the interface) and after the already known pop up about the resolution we can start working on it.

    For this new layer I chose a new stencil.

    And... that's all! :-) We only have to export the textures to Photoshop to finish the work. For that, we right click on the layers to get the exporting options. Also, once we save a project we get them saved too, located in a subfolder in the folder we are working.

   After Photoshop the final texture was like this:

    The shoes area was left like that (no texture) because for this I only used a procedural shader with the normal map. The lips were painted with a different shader and a mask controlling them.   

   So now... once all done, we can welcome Mrs Pear:

    I hope this tiny tutorial has shown you a bit of the process of this image.

   Thanks all for reading this tutorial :-)

If you like this tutorial, please write a comment or a suggestion in the "Guest Book" section. Thanks 

FRUITY FLASH: Mrs Pear by Jose Maria Andres Martin is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.