Hi, I am currently demoing mudbox for a particular use, and I am hoping that someone more experienced can tell me if the method I am using is the optimal one.

What I am doing is generating relief sculptures from portrait photographs (face and torso). My current method is to mask and crop each image in Photoshop, and then bring the image into Mudbox for use as a stencil (which I quickly raise with the sculpt tool). This is the method and the software which has given me the best results so-far, but it has some critical shortcomings such as the inability to lock the stencil to the underlying mesh (so I can’t zoom in and out as I sculpt. I have also tried several programs which automatically generate meshes from greyscale images, but the results were not sufficient.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated… Thanks!

If you’re working with something like the default plane, with good UVs, you can also use “Maps menu...Sculpt model with displacement map” to displace the mesh with the image.  The resulting displacement is stored to a separate layer so you can mask out or erase areas.  Adjust the opacity slider to increase the intensity.  Also, you can use the hotkey alt+F (holding cursor over mesh) to generate a freeze map from the layer information, if you want to protect areas of the image while sculpting.  If you want to see the original image as reference while you sculpt, you can also import the image as a paint layer.

Andrew Camenisch 18 November 2009 07:02 PM

Also, you can use the hotkey alt+F (holding cursor over mesh) to generate a freeze map from the layer information, if you want to protect areas of the image while sculpting.

Well thats news to me too. Great

oh now that is a sneaky feature that i never knew about....very handy to.