Thinking about Hair

As I'm about to jump head first into my final project for this 3D study, I'm trying to formulate a good solution for hair. I spent some time last evening playing with Maya's fur engine, which feels somewhat limited in it's offerings. I also spent some time experimenting with Mudbox to sculpt hair. This turned out to be a great lesson in what not to do with Mudbox modeling! While I like the hand-drawn hair, I'm concerned it will feel too stiff and statuesque.

Introduction to Modeling: Part B

This project started out really badly (Part A), where I built the little cap that is reused in each layer of the Swiss Army Knife. I had to switch between Sub-D & Polygons, which caused me a lot of problems. I think I have a better handle on how to work between the two methods now, because the rest of the knife came together pretty smoothly. Used a lot of different techniques with Polygons, Sub-D, and Nurbs. Plus learned how to do some simple clean-up to get 4-sided polys.

I was disappointed that the texturing aspect of this lesson didn't teach how to create the same photo-realistic look from the demo pictures. It just used some basic blinns for everything, so I played around with adding my own materials, lighting, and a basic backdrop. The one thing I wasn't able to do was get a Swiss Army logo to project onto the enameled surface. Will probably learn more about this in texturing lessons.

Introduction to Modeling: Part A

Onto the next Digital Tutors tutorial, this one is call intro to Modeling and takes the user through the steps to create a swiss army knife. It's been quite challenging so far - more so than building the space ship because I am asked to match shapes from images planes. I am also doing more complex operations like attaching Nurbs surfaces in addition to being careful to build "good" geometry. Here are two images from my process so far.