What this book covers

Chapter 1, Ready? Set..., introduces you to everything you need to know to get up and running with Mudbox 2013. This chapter will cover techniques such as speeding up your workflow, downloading custom brushes and meshes from the Mudbox community, and getting a comfortable color scheme for your interface. This should be the first stop for beginners and veterans alike.

Chapter 2, Heads Up, will acquaint you with the Mudbox 2013 interface so you can easily customize and find the tools that you need. Some of the recipes will also help you set up the camera, lights, and brush properties so that you can familiarize yourself with the location of the attributes you may need to use in your future projects. This chapter is very helpful for showing you around, if you are new to Mudbox, but also has a few intermediate level techniques for those who are already familiar with Mudbox.

Chapter 3, Broad Strokes, teaches you how to work with various brushes and even create your own brushes to be saved for later use. The recipes within this chapter focus on getting familiar with the brush's properties and how to use the various brush settings to get the effects that you want. This chapter is for anyone trying to learn more about the brushes so that they can customize their tool set rather than rely solely on the default set of brushes.

Chapter 4, Fine Tooth Comb, goes deeper into the brush's customization by focusing on stamps and stencils. The techniques you will learn in this chapter will allow you to add the fine details that will bring your digital sculpts to life! This chapter will be useful for all levels but those who already use Mudbox regularly may learn a new trick or two in this chapter.

Chapter 5, Get In and Get Out, focuses on importing and exporting assets that can be used inside and outside Mudbox. You will learn things such as adding detail to your mesh with a displacement map, working with multiple objects in your Mudbox scene, and creating a terrain using an outside image.

Chapter 6, Shine On, dives into using Mudbox materials to define the look and feel of your objects. Materials include properties that define how shiny your object is and how transparent your object is, among other things. These attributes are important in defining what your object would be made of in the real world. What you learn in this chapter will enable you to make your object look as though you could touch it.

Chapter 7, Time to Paint, covers the biggest strength of Mudbox, texture painting. You will learn how to paint with projections, get rid of seams with the Clone brush, and paint various maps using Mudbox's layer system. The techniques learned here will be useful for all users from beginner to advanced.

Chapter 8, Ready for My Closeup, walks you through lighting, viewport filters, and other ways of making your work presentable. The features covered in this chapter can produce visually stunning results right within your viewport, which can then be rendered out into a turntable for your portfolio, using the final recipe of this chapter. Not only that but you will learn how to produce normal maps directly from your viewport which allows you to easily create a texture version of your sculpts that retains surface direction for lighting.

Chapter 9, One Step Forward, is all about posing your characters and models within Mudbox 2013. This chapter will enable you to bring your characters to life by giving them dynamic poses and interesting silhouettes.

Chapter 10, Get Baked, explores how you would go about extracting your sculpt's details into various types of texture maps. The maps that you get from these processes are essential for creating low polygon game assets using the information that you extract from the high polygon sculpts.