Mudbox Painting

Mud box painting is very simple, its like the modelling only you just paint directly onto your 3d model, I thought I would finish the head and body first before anything, so to begin this I had to chose base colour for the skin because I wanted to try and paint it myself to try and improve on my art skills which are not a strength, for the base colour I went for a moderately bright coloured blue for the initial base seeing as how see is an alien and also getting influences by aquatic reptiles, this was painted over the entirety of the Body and Head I then added a new layer so that I didn't mess up my base layer this also allowed for some experimenting with colour but with the ability to be quickly edited, on this second layer I used this to pick out  details on the model  and bring them out by creating shading with the darker colour.

I then added a third layer and for this I decided to paint on a cover for the breast’s that would blend in with the corset that would  be put over when it was painted later, so this was a simple deep brown colour to match the design for the western style clothing, I did the same on the lower part of her body by painting on pants for her to cover her lower half of the body since adding a separate mess for the pants made the legs look to chunky and misshapen so I scrapped them.

Finally I returned to the eyes on the head and got a reference picture of a pair of purple eyes on Google images and saved the image I then imported it as a stencil and used the projection tool to paint the eye straight onto my mesh giving me a result I was really happy with.

Next I decided I would paint my corset and leave my scarf and boots until last because this would bring the outfit she would wear together, again for this I didn't think I could get the detail I wanted for the corset from simply painting alone my skill set isn't high enough yet so I looked for a reference image on Google images to be used for projection and I found one I really liked.

I used this image to again project the colour onto the mesh but I hit a problem with only having the front image, so I had to use the front and paint only certain sections of the stencil to give the illusion of different sides and a back and I believe I did a good job of this considering the image I used.

I then moved onto the Scarf, this was a simple process again I decided to project paint instead of regular painting on this so went and found an image of red knit close up so that it would look like the scarf was that of a red knit. I followed along the length of the scarf projection painting as I went until it was painted from one side to the other I didn't need to paint the inside because it wouldn't be seen and because of the way I did the UV’s it automatically did what it did to the front on the back too.

Finally I had to paint my Cowboy boots, for this I used a mix of both projection and regular painting, for the actual boot section made three layer and painted a base brown colour on one layer, a slightly lighter highlight brown on the second and on the third a darker more burnt brown and I used these to try give the illusion of worn leather with bits of the darker brown used to make scuffs and damage and the highlights to try and show slightly better quality sections considering my skill level in painting and colouring I thought this came out well but it could have been more detailed but due to time constraints I had to move on to the spur attached to the boot for this I used the corset image to project the brown and gold pattern for the breast section of the image onto the leather strap part of the spur and on a separate layer I then using a simple grey base coloured the metal part of the spur section I could get away with this since it was such a small part of the character I didn't need high detail on it because it would just be over looked.