Mudbox Experiment: Tree Stump

 Once I had done all of the necessary research into Autodesk Mudbox I wanted to start to have a little play with the software to get used to it before having to complete something more difficult. I started off by picking a pre-created mess, the simplest one I could think of that would still be able to include a lot of detail, which was a tree stump.

Below is what the original preset looked like when it is first added into Mudbox and it really doesn't look very good at all, so I wanted to be able to alter this big time to be able to create something that resembled a tree stump with colour and accuracy.

The first thing that  I wanted to do was add in the groves of the tree trunk, I did this by using the wax tool and changing the graph at the bottom so that the drop off is a lot steeper at the end. This meant that I could successfully chip away at different parts in order to create the correct texture. During this stage as well I experimented briefly with the paint tool as well to add in some brief colour. This worked quite well and I was able to add in different colours to emphasis the illusion of shadow even further.

After the experimentation with colour I decided to look into the stencils and how they can be applied, so I stripped the colour off of my tree trunk and then used the preset stencil of tree bark to be able to create this underneath. I do really like it, even though it is very white, but then again maybe I wanted to make the White Tree of Gondor, you never know.

What I really like about using the stencil tool as well is that you can either use the presets or bring in your own images to work with, which is a really nice feature if you need a specific pattern. I then tried to work a little bit of colour into it; this worked okay but if the colour went on too strong it would rub out the pattern.

The way in which I went about fixing this was by first selecting the colour in the painting option and then bringing up the stencil, I'm not sure if it is meant to work like this but it seemed to just fine, which would then paint on the pattern but in the desired colour as well, which did work well and gave me a good base colour to start with.

I then, once again, started to add in more colours to it, adding in a few darker colours to were the shady areas where to pick these out more and the adding a few highlights in a softer colour. I wanted to create a very dark looking swamp or forest tree stump that also had bits of moss on it, so I hinted at a few greeny colours throughout as well, which gave it a nice finish. 

One thing that I would have added to it at the end, if I had realised about it sooner, was using the stamp tool to create proper looking moss onto the sides of it, and not just painting on a little bit of green, although the technique did work okay. I really want to start getting into this software a lot more and watching a lot more video tutorials as well to be able to successfully get to grips with all aspects of it to enable my final video to have the most accurate and exciting looking CGI possible.