Autodesk's Mudbox is a computer based 3D sculpting and painting tool. It was first used to produce the 2005 Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. It is primarily used as a high-resolution digital sculpting, texture painting, and design tool. Introducing Mudbox is a guide to help you get up to speed on all of Mudbox's features and functions while showing you how to sculpt and paint as well as master an effective workflow.
Introducing Mudbox uses Mudbox 2011 as its base interface and will show you how to use Mudbox through step-by-step lessons to teach you the basics of digital sculpting, 3D painting, texturing, and workflow. Introducing Mudbox is 416 pages and is divided into nine chapters.
Chapter One, "Getting Your Feet in the Mud: The Basics of the Mudbox Production Line," begins with the fundamentals of what this book is about. Here the basic concepts are laid out and everything else from here builds on these concepts. This is the most important chapter in the book, and so you need to have a good grasp of all of the concepts that are laid out in this chapter.
Chapter Two, "The Mudbox User Interface," focuses on the Mudbox 2011 user interface and will identify the different sections that you will work within Mudbox. You will begin with the welcome screen then move to the main viewport, the east frame window, the south frame tray, and see how to do map extraction. It is here that you learn all about working with in the Mudbox interface.
Chapter Three, "Detail-Sculpting an Imported Model," takes you through a more complex model with multiple parts. Here you will work with a high-resolution version of Bertie the robot – this was briefly introduced in chapter one, to do some surface detail sculpting. This mesh was modeled in Maya, and here in Mudbox you will cover topics such as laying out UVs, naming conventions, setting up the model, sculpting surface details, and look at introducing weathering and wear and tear on the model.
Chapter Four, "Painting and Texturing an Imported Model," continues from the last chapter, but moves on with prepping it for final output. In this chapter you will learn about texture-painting in 2D and 3D, creating texture maps, how to use materials and textures, working with layers, gathering reference images, and work on painting Bertie.
Chapter Five, "Digital Sculpting, Part I," examines one of the most significant applications of Mudbox – that of sculpting. In this and the next chapter you will look at the sculpting tools and the workflow to create a digital sculpture. This chapter focuses on the early stages of development where you determine the look for the character.
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