Autodesk Mudbox

Autodesk^® Mudbox™ digital sculpting and texture painting software gives you the freedom to create production-ready 3D digital artwork without worrying about the technical details. Designed by professional artists from the game, film, television, and design industries, Mudbox combines an intuitive user interface with a powerful creative toolset of stencils and brushes for ultra-realistic 3D character modeling, engaging environments, and stylized props. Available for the Mac^®, Microsoft^® Windows^®, and Linux^® operating systems.

Key strengths of Autodesk Mudbox

• Easy to use & learn - intuitive tools and workflow; clean & simple user-interface; virtually no learning curve

• A world class sculpting toolset – fast, smooth and more accurate results

• Paint directly on 3D models – see results immediately as you paint directly onto high-res models

• Explore concepts more quickly  –  layers can be turned  on and off selectively so you can try different ideas and variations on different layers and easily make revisions at any point in the process

• Paint multiple material channels – includes a powerful toolset for painting and viewing diffuse, specular, reflection, bump and certain other textures across multiple high-resolution maps on your models

• Superior performance – work with millions of polygons, while viewing the entire asset with interactive shadows & lights

New features in Mudbox 2012

UV-Less Painting

Enjoy the freedom of not having to create UVs before you paint! Texture artists will be able to eliminate or reduce the time-consuming and often difficult task of creating UVs; even complex assets comprised of multiple meshes will be able to simply be loaded, and painted right away. The resulting high-quality textures will be able to be exported as Ptex files for an entirely UV-less process, or, for a pipeline requiring UVs, baked into UV space once UVs have been created, and exported as image files. The Ptex library is released as open source software and is included with Pixar Animation Studio’s RenderMan^® software; support for displaying Ptex files will now also be included in Autodesk^® Maya^® 2012 software.

Large Texture Datasets

Now it’s possible to paint and manage large texture datasets, in order to create the very detailed, high-quality assets required by today’s demanding productions. Thanks to a new texture and tile management system, artists can display and paint hero assets with hundreds of texture maps consisting of billions of texels.

Paint Layer Masks and Blend Modes

Combine and edit paint in powerful nondestructive ways, with new paintable layer masks for paint layers that enable artists to selectively reveal or hide portions of layers. Furthermore, 22 new layer blend modes help extend artistic possibilities and offer significantly enhanced compatibility with Adobe^® Photoshop^® software.

Editable Stencils

Easily make use of available images to rub or project detail onto models, with the new ability to deform stencils to help align their texture data to underlying model features. In addition, artists will be able to leverage the full painting toolset to help modify existing stencil images or paint new stencils, while a new option enables tileable stencils to be painted with greater ease.

Single-Step Suites Interoperability

Work more efficiently with other products in the Autodesk^® Entertainment Creation Suites 2012, with the new ability to round-trip data with Maya 2012, Autodesk^® 3ds Max^® 2012, and Autodesk^® Softimage^® 2012 software. The new workflow will help support iterative round-tripping: beginning with a scene in the content creation application, data can be exported to Mudbox where paint or sculpting detail can be added, then merged back into the original scene, and then refined again in Mudbox, and so on;  each transfer will only require a single step to execute.

Performance Improvements

A number of performance improvements in Mudbox 2012 are intended to help artists to paint and sculpt at higher resolutions more smoothly; save scenes with texture data in less time; create, select, and duplicate paint layers more interactively; and load dense OBJ meshes more quickly.

New Brushes and Brush Options 

Mudbox 2012 will offer a more robust painting and sculpting toolset including: the new ability to apply a single brushstroke across multiple objects; new grab tool options that offer enhanced control over shaping a model’s silhouette; and lasso and rectangle marquee modes for selection, freeze, and weights tools.

Multiple Joints

Create, manage, and weight multiple joints to more quickly and easily deform and pose full-figure models. Artists now will be able to create symmetrical pairs of joints, while joint hierarchies can be created automatically based on influenced vertices.

Pose Presets

Work with multiple poses nondestructively, with the new ability to store joint transforms as presets. Artists will be able to sculpt models in different poses and have these sculptural changes carry across from one pose to the next, deforming correctly in the space of each pose—great for accessing difficult areas for painting or sculpting, or for testing designs in different positions.