Week 4

As I had finished the basic form of the temple, it was time for me to begin modelling my statue using Autodesk Mudbox. I haven't had much experience in Mudbox prior to this stage of my modelling so I have been struggling quite a bit to get the shape of my model correct. This became an issue when I began to manipulate the default body model in Mudbox. As my temple was based around the temps of Zeus, it felt right to use his statue as a influence as well. I liked the idea of having the statue sitting in a chair as well, it would mean I could attempt to create a fairly detailed chair for my statue. Currently, I only have a box for the model to stand on as I hadn't decided on how my statue will be posed.
However, I immediately had issues with posing the model in Mudbox. No matter what I tried the model's legs and arms didn't bend how I would have liked them. I tried changing the influence of the pivot point but I still couldn't get the pose correct. This is when a peer of mine suggested I use the Andy Rig. Andy Rig is a premade model - for Maya - that has a rig already attached to it. This made the posing process incredibly easy for me. I was able to pose the model to how I like it which meant all I needed to do was export it and import it into Mudbox to sculpt it. This, however, was another drawback. Unlike the Mudbox premade model, Andy Rig was a very skinny and short model. If I wanted to statue similar to Zeus I needed to sculpt it a lot of body mass and then refine the details. I managed to get the hang of some of the tools during this process but my model doesn't look anywhere near as bulky as Zeus. Currently, I'm not found of the model as it's taking a long time to build up it's mass.

This is the Andy Rig, I have been using this model for my statue.

To pose the Andy Rig all you need to do is selected the purple box or the spheres and use the move or rotate tool to pose. It was a lot simpler to pose this than it was to pose the in Mudbox.

This is the posed model within Mudbox. I exported the Maya file (as an .obj) and imported into Mudbox. Before I exported, I deleted the hair from the model as I would prefer to try and do hair more suitable for my statue.