Puns apart, since I started to make game assets, Mudbox became a primary tool on my workflow. To be honest, I’ve only made a few game models so far, If you look into my portfolio you would see a bunch of high-poly renders that surpass the 5.000.000 poly count barrier, so this is really new for me, and I’m really LOVING it, every day it’s a new lesson, and I feel compelled to share with all of you the knowledge that I acquired, that’s the reason why I have made the earlier article on scanned assets, and I’ll be releasing a game pipeline article on CGMasters in a few days, so I’m really excited to share my adventures on the low poly world with you, and speaking of it, here’s a candle model I’m doing for our game, as my first environment in todo list is a Graveyard, how cool would it be to have some candles melting into the tombstones? That’s what I call mood, damn.



So I just started with a very ugly raw base mesh to work further on Mudbox.

And to be honest, I’m really looking forward on using Z-brush, every time I watch a timelapse on youtube about it, I immediately think: OH GOD, HELL YEA SWEET LIKE CANDY that’s a very interesting software, but every time that I opened it I run scared D:

Maybe in the course of development you guys will be able to witness my change to Zbrush 😮

Although, I really like Mudbox, especially for painting, and I’ll probably continue to use it for that (unless I discover the wonders of Mari or Substance Painter.)

Sculpting candles is actu ally very easy, just some random brushwork like a modern painting, trying to achieve a good silhouette is something very cool too, BUT therein lies the problem: I was so excited with my sculpting that almost forgot that I would need to retopologize everything later. At first I tried to retopo by hand, since I really like being able to control everything that way… Just nope. My hand almost exploded with all the clicks and extrudes, and not a very exciting model to do this kind of work. Ok, so let’s decimate! I used Meshlab for it, oh man, almost 1k tris to get a rough result 🙁

I ended up deciding to use decimate and tweak a bit more the mesh to be under 1k, the other not-so-melted candles will have a sensible less amount of polygons, so I can handle that, for the name of CGI.

I have cut the UV grossly without giving a single damn to topology or whatever, just to see what all that junk would look like, surprisingly the results were much better than expected (thanks god!!) and I went back to getting excited. I also painted a base texture in mudbox using the baked AO, Cavity and Curvature maps from xNormal, and a gradient mask using Blender Paint tools to use as a map for Translucency/Emission.

The results with all that stuff are very average yet, (and that’s why this post is a WIP) but let’s see how this turns out, more to come soon 😉

Some images about the current state of progress: (IN BLENDER GAME ENGINE!)

(That way, I can put it in any object corner)

(Base mesh / Retopo test mesh / Decimated mesh)

(Before you ask, to get this effect I had to use a monster amount of lights – cheats, bro)

And here’s a early test using SSS shader on Marmoset Toolbar 2: