Getting into Mudbox

Well over the past few weeks I have been trying to get to grips with Mudbox. Because my character is going to be set in a Medieval setting he will be suited up with armour. Now at first I had been struggling on how to actually make this armour as I hadn't been sculpting for very long and so far I could only manage to do stuff to the face to a very limited level. 

As time went on people were saying that you could use 3DS MAX to do the armour for the character but I had no idea how I would be able to make the armour in max and then get it to look right also being able to get back across and make it look half decent in Mudbox. So I then thought I might as well give it a go and just stick with Mudbox thinking it would be the easier option. So I started messing around with the freeze tool in Mudbox so I could just sculpt the armour onto the model, which seemed like a good idea because from what I managed to get out of it in such a short time seemed promising. 

However it would soon be revealed to me of an easier way and that was infact using MAX. In one of Gin's lessons he showed us how to link Mudbox and MAX together, not only that but he showed us how to make armour just by using the human model as the template, he would just select the polygons he wanted the piece of armour to cover and then clone the polygons, then by just scaling it up a bit he managed to make it look like shoulder armour which was brilliant as it fitted perfectly and looked like the real deal. Then it was just a simple case of exporting back over to Mudbox. 

So after he had showed us this technique I was right on it, however when I did it at confetti the files wouldn't open at home so I pretty much have to do everything at home. When I'm in lesson at Confetti I'm just using it as an opportunity to experiment without any issue of risk to my work due to the fact I can't seem to open it up at home after I have saved it at Confetti. So here is what I managed to make, now it is only the base model for the armour and for the next three weeks I'm going to sculpt the armour to create nice detail before I have to paint the model for the following two weeks.