Arm Sculpt Project

Arm Sculpt Project for CDC 

My last project for Character Design and Creation at Full Sail University.  The project was to sculpt an arm, rebuild the topology and bake out a normal map.  All in all if felt the project went fine.  I was happy with the overall sculpt and thought the topology came out nice, although I do feel that I could have been better.  The wrinkles in the hand could have come out a lot better  and the exaggeration kinda made he sculpt look stylized.  With the finger wrinkles I tried a few different things and wasn't really happy with any of the results.  

I did find building the base mesh in Zbrush much faster than I had first anticipated and I will use that technique on future projects.  One thing I would do differently next time is create some alphas of knuckles and wrinkles.  Sculpting them by hand didn't work and in one aspect of the project that could have been better.  

One issue that did pop up when working on this project was when I baked my normal map out.  The search distance "envlope" was to small hand keep showing black marks in the normal map.  Another issue was that when I applied my normal map the seems showed up, but after reading the Maya 2016 Doc's I found that you have to set the color space for normal maps to RAW in 2016.  

Dynamesh Basemesh

Created this base mesh using Zbrush. It started out as a sphere which I then dynameshed and by pushed and pulled it around I created the basic shape of the arm.

Arm Sculpt

After many hours of sculpting I finally felt the arm was finished.  I added a little bit of exaggeration to the sculpt; in hopes that it would make the detail more defined when I go to extracted the normal map.

Final Break Down

Here is an image of the base mesh, sculpted mesh and retopoed mesh with the normal map applied inside Maya.  I felt the retopoed mesh with the normal map holds strong resemblance to the sculpted mesh.