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I had a terrible painful breakup while I was attending the Art institute. So many promises, so many great ideas, but no delivery. Then when a sexier, sleeker looking thing came my way, I jumped ship. That's right, I broke up with 3ds Max and switched over to Maya. I should have known hanging out with an Ex was a bad idea becuase I'm starting to think about taking her back... More on that later...

I spent a few more hours today working in 3DS Max and Mudbox. I'm really liking how easy Mudbox is to just pick up and use. No crazy 2.5d to fight with like in some other sculpting programs...(cough *zBrush* cough) The tools are straight forward, and react as you'd imagine. Now I just wish I was a better sculpter, and more skilled digital painter, as those are the real skill sets being drawn from here.

After detailing the rebarb sections, adding places where the rebarb penetrates the concrete pillar, and detailing the pipes and wire box, I exported the model to prep for unwrapping.

Now no one wants to unwrap a 9 mil poly model. Seriously. Even my lowest Sub-D level in Mudbox was over 100K tris. So I took the obj into 3D Photo Browser 9.1 and used their Polygon Cruncher on it, to reduce it to an even 1000 tris. Then I took that into 3Ds Max to unwrap.
So pelt mapping was in the 'Proof of Concept' stage last time I played around with it. In Max 2009 it works like magic. Between pelt mapping, the auto relax tool, and the pack tool this guy was unwrapped and laid out flawlessly in under 5 minutes. That basically eliminated one of the most tedious parts of modeling.

Looks like 3DS Max has been hitting the gym, and is looking extra sexxxy...
(and I've officially leveled up in 'Nerd.')