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I moved this from my gallery thread.
Hey guys!
I’ve sprayed primer on the 3D printed model and it looks pretty different now. You can see all of the details as well as printing artifacts. I’ll take some photos tomorrow when I get in.
For now I’m posting a rough draft of that hard surfacing tutorial. Once I finalize it I’ll move it to the tutorials section of the messageboard.
Hard Surface Tutorial
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This tutorial is help people create clean and almost mechanical surfaces within Mudbox.
I like to create a lot of clean, interlocking shapes when I sculpt. Much of it is work that a lot of people would normally do with subdivision surfaces or splines in an external program. For complex mechanical shapes you’ll still need to use one of those programs, but for things like characters and especially art nouveau type architectual reliefs you can easily sculpt them in Mudbox.
One of the things you’ll need to accept is that its going to be very difficult to get a perfectly clean edge or mechanical surface, but you can get close enough that you probably wont care about the little imperfections. Otherwise you might go insane trying to get all the little dimples and bumps out.
For this demonstration I’m sculpting on a basic sphere primitive within Mudbox.
The first step is to rough out your shape using all the basic tools (soft brush and smooth tool). I use the scratch brush to define edges and where corners should be. I tend to use higher Sub-D levels with some of the hard surface shapes because of how the smooth tool works. At lower resolutions it is much easier to distort your surface with the smooth and flatten tools, which you want to avoid.
Usually I’ll start my rough shape on a new layer. This allows me to make use of the masking feature. Masking is incredibly useful for nice clean shapes and preserving your underlying geometry so dont forget to use it! Here is my sphere after sketching in a shape to start with.
http://turqy.com/mb_tutorial/Starting_Sphere.jpg
This first video shows how I use the masking feature to clean up edges and to preserve my underlying sphere mesh:
Masking
One of the most useful tools for hard surface modeling is the flatten tool. Thats a pretty obvious statement but one of the most powerful aspects of the flatten brush is turning off the �average plane� option under advanced. This causes the brush to use the mesh normals under the center of the brush instead of flattening based on the average normal of all the verts within the radius of the brush. You can use this to clean up corners by dragging the very edge of the brush near the corner that you want to clean up. This is probably the technique that helps me the most in keeping my edges nice and clean. Heres a video of this in action:
Flatten Brush with Average Plane OFF
With average plane on you can smooth out surfaces similar to the smooth tool but without some of the stretch that occurs. You can also use it to make your corners look chamfered:
Edge Chamfer
This is something a lot of people probably already do but I thought I’d point it out just in case. Many times I will draw outlines of shapes with the scratch brush and then smooth along one side of the brush stroke to create a smooth transition from the stroke to the surface I drew over. This lets you create ledges ramped shapes quickly. You can also use the curve tool to create your first brush stroke to ensure a very smooth form.
Smooth brush corners
Keeping your surfaces intact while doing other modeling is something you’ll need to do from time to time. You can do this by using the mask tool with an extra layer or the freeze tool. For this video I used the mask tool (Freeze tool is a little buggy right now).
Protect Edges
For little details I use all sorts of tricks. The curve tool is great for adding nice clean line work on your model. Layer masks also provide a lot cool ways to add details.
Masking Trick
Mixing layer masks and flatten brush with update plane turned off also provides some nice results.
Flatten Brush and Layer mask Details
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