Works of Progress: Mewtwo

This project doesn't count as "A History" since I had only just finished it this week.

I am very very proud to present: Mewtwo. A Pokemon.

This took me about a month on and off to work on completely. Needless to say, I am very proud of it. I made less mistakes and put more effort in the process of the work than the result, which to me is more important in the long run.

For this model, I started with the head then immediately built the body. The torso was by far the most difficult part because of its odd shape and the fact that his legs emerge from the side of his waist instead of straight down like a human (not that he is anyway).

Base model with Turbosmooth

To make him stand out a little, I messed around with lighting up the area.

I also added eyes. This one is what kept me from adding proper eyes to the other models like Cooler or the Protoss. The models physically could not support perfectly spherical eyes. If they were too big only to fit the eye socket, some of the eye mesh would stick out of the forehead or the temple. Why did I want eyes to work properly? To have him look around of course! To have him properly look around, the eyes need to rotate. Another way was to physically move the texture on the eyeball but that is much more tedious and rather stupid. So how do you work an eye that is 1) not spherical, 2) must be kept from accidentally moving out of the head during a rotation, 3) and kept that non-spherical shape throughout. I did some research and found an idea on a forum. By using a FFD (free-form deformation) spacewarp! In layman's terms, as far as my knowledge goes, the FFD adds puppet strings to an object in the form of a grid and you control the puppet strings using the vertices of the grid which deforms the object. By encasing the eye inside the grid-box of the FFD and the sphere bound to the FFD, I squished the FFD which in turn squished the eye to an elliptical shape. The result is that rotating the eye will not affect the shape. Sure the vertices move in the rotation but it will always keep the same elliptical shape in the same direction.The last thing to it was to create a dummy object and bind the eyes to the dummy with a LookAt modifier, so I can move the dummy and the eyes will look in the direction of the dummy. Great success!

Thinking back, it actually did not take me long to get the base model down. It took perhaps half a week on and off. The UVs for this guy were much more simple since there was not much to him in terms of color.

So the UVs were done fairly quickly and surprisingly cleanly for the most part. Then I slapped on some temporary coloring work to see how he looked.

Gettin dat close-up.

What next? ZBRUSH! I put in some detailing work, adding muscle and some skin while trying to retain the fact that he is not a physical fighter. He has muscle, but he is also skinny as a rail. Despite having massive thighs. Exported a bump map as well as an updated base model from Zbrush and came back into Max. This time I put the bump map in the correct map channel...the Normal Map.

Details aren't as pronounced as in Zbrush but that is expected since it is a bump map and not physical deformations that make the details.

I also updated the coloring. It is not much, but still...

I rigged him to be ready for posing. Throughout the few poses I made of him, I was able to find and iron out artifacts.

A more classic pose, based on the official art at the top of this post.

Another pose, messed around with some shadow-ball stuff. Fixed a lot of artifacts in his legs.

Technically this was the very first pose only to stretch him out and test all of the bones to get rid of any inconsistencies and artifacts. That neck...I know...I ironed out most of that in later poses...

When posing for Mewtwo, I actually found my brain. Instead of posing him in Zbrush, I posed him in 3ds Max then exported the pose into Zbrush on top of the detailed model, so he kept the details and everything while in the pose. Why did I not think of this before? Seriously...

I built 3 platforms for him, 1 of which was scrapped and the other 2 are final. 1is quite plainly the best: the Pokeball. The other is based on the stage Mewtwo came down in in the first Pokemon movie, Mewtwo Strikes Back.