mudboxing

Well folks, I'm back after a short break. Things got busy this past week and I've been trying to recover. I feel like that makes me sound like a real weakling, that whenever something rocks my boat I take a week off to recover. The real problem is not that I stop painting or drawing, but that I stop doing personal work. And that's a problem. That aside, I don't really have a problem showing/discussing weakness because I'm not a consummate human being really. I do, unfortunately, slack off (curse you TF2!) and waste time on stupid stuff.

Buuuuut I'm getting back on the horse, and this time, in the form of 3D modelling.  I know it needs to be a part of my portfolio soooo this is what I did to start. Mudbox has a really friendly user interface that I could quickly wrap my head around and mess with the hotkey settings until I felt like I was painting in Corel Painter, my weapon of choice.

I knew I should work from some point of reference in this exercise, so I chose this guy:

Bad idea. First off, it was really difficult working from an unresolved sketch and I ended up abandoning perhaps much of what is there because it was either above my skill level to accomplish with my tools, or just nonsensical. It made it very clear to me that I need to push so that my own designs are much more structural and clear in every way possible. 

My sketch above has some ambiguous dome head, no definition to the ears, and very little structure in the face. I had to really work to keep him from turning into Yoda.

I've included a couple of shots, feel free to comment and critique -- I would love the opinion of somebody that knows more about 3D modelling than me.

2 hrs. Mudbox 2013.

eth.