APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 7 10/10114

     This week I started sculpting my tiger model after finishing my UVs. I began sculpting the main body first since it's the part that needs to show the muscular bulkiness of the tiger. The head doesn't require much sculpting since it's like a skull mask and will block most of the tiger's facial features. I'm currently using my tiger anatomy reference images to sculpt out the muscles on my tiger. Even though my reference are good, it doesn't completely show every part and contour of the tiger's muscle structure and muscle flow. Making me have to use some online reference and my own intuition when some of the online sources don't give me exactly what I want to see.
     Other than the sculpting, I went back into Maya to resize and reposition some of my UVs to fix some UV stretching and compression. I don't want my tiger model to be overly muscular with every muscle bulging from its body. I just want some bulkiness and a nice cut muscle shape to maintain its agile form. Some of the muscle sculpture don't always turn out the way I want them too and so I'd have to erase most portions of the front chest and arm and re-sculpt them again. I use the depression of the sculpt tool to get a better view and contour shape of the muscle tone on the tiger. It also makes it a lot easier to bulk up a set of muscles and continue on the muscle parts. Once I get the shape and depression I want on the muscle, I smooth it out with the smooth tool to clean up the muscles and depression lines.

After sculpting my tiger body and head, I applied them to my model in Maya. The rest of the body looks okay on the soft normal tiger model but there seems to be some weird distortions on the body and some black geometry spaces on the front and back foot. I think the distortion could be because of the stretching and compression of the UVs. The black geometry could be missing UVs from the main UV map but I'm not exactly sure.