Puzzle Pieces

Everything is on its way to falling in place (touch wood). I have my low poly turntable animated above sand. Unfortunately the surface shader still refused to work but the video does its job anyway. I created my environment as a futuristic laboratory desk opposed to a coral reef because there was a period of confusion this morning. I had my completed Mudbox file rendering out all sorts of maps but applying them in Maya was like trying to assemble a puzzle without knowing what image to aim for. All the tutorials online I saw told me to do different things and it was all very confusing.

Initially I thought I would be unable to get the high poly detail onto my animated low poly mesh so I decided to change my environment to a lab desk where the swimming recluse would be posed for dissection with its aims spread out as I have in the high poly Mudbox file. Therefore I produced a simple environment for the recluse to exist in for the high poly turntable. Kah showed me the proper way to use my normal and ambient occlusion map through photoshop to produce a high detail, low poly model but at this point I was already attached to the lab environment so I stuck with it.

The renders of the HD-LP model don't show off the detail of the high poly model as much as I would have liked so for the print resolution images I'm going to use the high poly mesh in Maya (hopefully without crashing it) to get some nice close up shots of thee swimming recluse's carapace.

This is the difference at the moment. I intend to layer a specular map over the shell before doing the print renders but at this time they are still a little grainy looking.