Mudbox 3D Crab

First project of college was with a program that I'd never used before, which made it all the more fun, Mudbox. Pretty much the same a Z brush but this one works side by side with 3D Studio Max for loading models. Our project was to create, in 3D, an animal from the Natural History Museum. The model was to be as photo realistic as possible in both detail and texturing. We had 7 weeks to do this project and I'm really happy with the way my model turned out, especially since it was my first time using this sort of modelling technique.

This is the original low rez model in 3D Max, fully texture and posed with the normal map created in Mudbox placed on it. I'm really happy with this way this turned out and I shall be using Mudbox again with any future 3D project. Below are the step I went through creating all of it's detail and texturing in Mudbox.

This is how the model look when it was taken from 3d Max into Mudbox. Still quite detailed when it comes to it's joints in it's legs as I come from an animation background when it comes to building 3D models. So I know how to setup joints for them to be able to work when it comes to skinning. Now we didn't have to skin these models but I still built it that way as it was no extra trouble for me, and would make it easier later on when I got to the higher detail levels.

The joints and legs where the first place I started working the detail into.

It seem the more you worked on it the less and less noticeable things changed

Here we have the last layer of detail worked into the surface of the crab. This was at about 14 million polygons and was where I got all of the hard body detail on the claws and shell to really pop out.

And lastly we have the texturing. Mudbox is a wonderful program to work with as I could paint right onto the model or take the texture map into Photoshop and work on it there. I used both of this techniques to creative the texture, partly because I know my way around Photoshop really well and partly because the computer I was working on couldn't handle Mudbox at times so painting was just to slow.