Nano Mesh vs Micro Poly
One crucial part of developing my sharkbug beast, was an idea I had having the head of it be entirely metal, and wanting to use the alpha I had made previously as the material to replace the head with. However, there were 2 ways of which I could do this, and I was trying to find the better way. Nanomesh is part of ZModeller, which allows you to place an insertmesh in the center of a poly, or polygroup, whilst micropoly replaces the faces with the material.
Originally I experimented heavily with Nano Mesh, as it had way more control variables, and this was the typical result.
It looked good, however, it was way too layered for me, and it made parts of the head too thick to the point where you’d miss out on the details, also the way it overlapped at the mouth specifically really put me off of using it overall for my final head product. On the other hand, Micro Poly did exactly what I needed to do, and in similar poly count!
I’m really satisfied with the way that each little sheet of metal stretches out to fit the entire shape of the shark head, and you can still clearly see the texture and bumps on the metal itself, providing in my opinion the perfect amount of detail for this part of the body.
Body Construction!
With the head in a good state, I started working on the body for my sharkbug beast, I even prompted to create another alpha to use as a subtool, as I was unsure on how to create a precise wing, using sculpting, and due to the level of precision I wanted, alphas were needed. Here is a look at the body in the earlier parts of this week!
Throughout the week, I kept working on this until I had finally reached a good fundamental point, where I was ready to start focussing on other aspects, such as the wing/arms and the legs and finer details, before moving to photoshop.
Here is the alpha I used for the metal wings below. At this point in the project, I really wanted to start pushing pipes and cables, etc to try and drive that techy look.
On top of this, I also had made a small node/coil object in ZModeller, as advised by my lecturer, considering how cables and pipes just came out of parts of the body, and it seemed incredibly un-natural, which was a great criticism for my work.
But for now, this concludes my Week 4 antics, in Week 5, I look to create the legs for my sharkbug beast, as well as start looking at lighting, possible rendering and composition, ready to move it to photoshop for paintover. I also want to look at making use of texture nodes, so that when it comes to paintover, my job becomes a lot easier.