If you guys are a fan of LOTR then this is just the project for you! Remember the awesome looking Oliphant? Well you to can now follow through this step by step tutorial and model it yourself!

Kurt takes you right from the very start – setting up your image reference planes – to your modeling and final render. We continue the Oilphant Modeling by laying out the UV?s using strips of color which we will use to planar map as well as automatic map to achieve flat Uvs. Once we have our creatures UV?s underway we will use tools such as move and sew UV?s, as well as cut UV?s, to combine and reshape to create a nice flat combined UV map. After our UV map is created its time to learn how to create a UV snapshot to import into a paint program like Photoshop so we can begin to hand paint both the skin color as well as the bump textures of the character. You will learn how to use layers and colors in Photoshop as well as different brush settings to build up skin color. Near the end of the project we will do some prodedural texturing using some of the built-in Maya materials and textures to texture the rigging on our characters back. Continue Reading