Portfolio Piece 01 - Week 02

For this week, I finalized my Zbrush high res sculpt of Amumu by polishing up areas like the cuffs and hands as well as add in the Christmas lights which plays a big part of the skin concept. In order to do this, I had to use to rough paintover I did last week:

Paintover of how to do the Christmas lights wrapping

This was important as due to the perspective of the original fan concept, it is hard to discern nor did it matter how the wires were wrapped around Amumu when it came to the start and end of the wire. After experimenting around I established that the above method of wrapping made the most logical sense while maintaining the looks of the original concept by Noah Warner. 

When it came to actually creating the lights, I initially looked into the curves tool, but upon some research, I stumbled upon another idea with using Zspheres to block out the wires and then changing them into an adaptive skin. Dude to the fact that the upper body and lower body are currently separate, I opted the Zspheres method when it came to creating the wires. However, this experience taught me there are multiple ways to go about tackling such an issue and to use which ever way one is more comfortable with/efficient with for the situation at hand.

Creating the ends of the wires has also been fun as I got to mess around and use the Zmodeler brush more. So far this project has taught me a lot when it came to blocking out and box modeling inside of Zbrush without having to use Maya as well as a whole bunch of Zbrush tricks I had not properly looked into before.

When it came to the lights themselves, I simply created an Insert Mesh brush and saved it as well if I ever decide to do more Christmas themed skins or models of sorts.

As for the next step, I will need to go into Maya for retopology and UVs. Originally I had planned to learn and use 3DCoat's retopology tools and see how it compares to Maya's, but for times sake this time around, I opted to go with something I am comfortable with. Next time I want to dive deeper into 3DCoat's tools.

Final Zbrush sculpt

Start to retopology

With regards to my current timeline, spending time to learn how to do the lights as well as it being Memorial Day weekend, I ended falling behind on my timeline. As such I will need to put more hours in on project to catch up. I will need to finalize textures by this Sunday/Monday in order to get on track with rigging and presentation work on the last week. I am excited to see the progress on this project and how it is actually coming to life!