This has been a frustrating week in my 3D sculpting adventures. It seems for every one or two steps forward I take fourteen steps backwards. I’m still working on the eye/eyelid area for the dragon.
It turns out the mesh extract and then merge technique is a little tricky, or touchy, or both. A tweak in one place and then a smooth or polish results in a lump or dip in another spot. The smooth brush seems to both shrink and thicken the mesh for the eye lids. The mPolish brush feels counter intuitive. I keep forgetting to double check my sub/add setting here but I’m not changing anything so I’m pretty sure I’m using the defaults. It’s all quite exasperating after an hour or two.
I suspect, the source of my problems reside first in the size and shape of the original mask I created to make the mesh extraction. Adding to that was how and how well I adjusted the extracted mesh to meet up with the rest of the model that it was merged to.
At this point I am debating whether to back up and try the mesh extract and merge process again or to come up with something I can live with and then just move on. Even though I’m already planning on creating a new dragon from scratch once I finish the lessons in the book, the choice really isn’t that easy.
What I’ve found is that stepping back to the point where the problem starts and trying again from there seems to facilitate understanding the tools and processes. I’ve done this a couple of times already on this project and once with the eyes. I was having trouble with the inner eye lid shape getting all messed up as I was working around it. It turns out I missed a key masking step. By restarting from that point I was able to pick up, and grasp the concept of the move part brush as well as get a better handle on the behavior of the mPolish brush.
We’ll see where my patience and frustration take me next. Certainly, restarting from the mesh extract gives me a chance to practice that right at the point when I know what I did wrong, or think I do.