Muddy good fun
Published Fri 13 Mar 2009
The innovative Mudbox 2009 gives users an expressive way to model in 3D, adding to Autodesk's diverse portfolio.
Autodesk has a very diverse portfolio of products, covering markets like manufacturing, architecture, civil engineering, media and entertainment and process plant. As each division expands and acquires innovative products to cater to specific niches, the company as a whole benefits from adding to the in-house technologies it can deploy across the entire product range.
The media and entertainment division, the chaps behind 3ds Max and all those special effects you see in films, acquired a New Zealand company called Skymatter in 2007. The company’s product, Mudbox was originally designed for artists in the film and games industry to allow sculpting and texture painting of 3D models, without the constraints of traditional modelling. The aptly named Mudbox allows artists to produce very organic shapes, through the moulding and shaping of digital, highly malleable ‘mud’.
At the same time Autodesk’s Mechanical Division has been investing a lot of energy into freeform 3D design tools, acquiring companies like Alias to get considerable presence in the conceptual design phase of projects and it is here that Mudbox may have applications for creative product designers.
Mudbox is exceptionally adaptable and easy to use; all that’s not included in the box is artistic talent. From starting up the program, its games roots are immediately visible, with templates for humans, lizards and tree stumps! For the designer there are more obvious start-points such as sphere, cube and a flat surface. The interface is very simple, with tool palettes at the bottom and to the right of the modelling area. The material to be shaped shows up as a brown object on a 2D plane in 3D space. Mudbox geometry is all about resolution, all the faces of the object are meshed grids and these meshes can be increased or decreased in resolution, depending on the level of detail required. These are called subdivision surfaces. The higher the density of the grid, the smoother the operation and greater detail. The tools allow the material to be pinched, bulged, sculpted, cut, smoothed, extruded etc. It’s even possible to ‘mirror’ sculpting across an axis to produce symmetrical geometry and cut down on modelling time.
Materials like bump maps can be ‘sprayed’ or stamped onto the model giving stunning life-like textures. In addition, a range of colouring and lighting tools allow the designer to bring some life beyond the ‘mud’ default.
Typical applications in the product development cycle are at the concept stage, which can be used in addition to foam work or product envelope design. While traditional CAD systems are great at rounds and fillets, Mudbox provides an organic creativity that is just not possible to achieve in traditional parametric-driven systems. With Autodesk’s focus on integration, Mudbox models can be easily used in conjunction with 3ds Max and Maya.
Conclusion
Despite its origins, Mudbox could be used in pretty much any industry that requires conceptual design. The default settings are perhaps more angled at its traditional arena of character design for 3D games and animation but we are at an exciting point in time where CAD technologies are not being kept in industry silos and barriers are being broken down by designers that are innovating by using an ever growing number of diverse technologies to deliver original solutions. This is being driven by the need to keep as much product development digital before prototyping or manufacture.
I’ve never used anything quite like Mudbox before. It’s very easy to learn and the results just don’t look like they have come out of a computer. Autodesk is taking Mudbox and showing that as the man/machine interface develops, the interactive nature of touch sensitive screens and modelling will converge to create some fascinating opportunities.
