Le Suckfest

Recently deadmau5 dropped a single entitled "Suckfest9001" - As usual, this Soundcloud release lacks an album cover; therefore I obviously had to make one to avoid the boring default background of a barely-opaque music note appearing when listening to the song.

I used the backdrop from my really, really old bike tutorial file for this setup:

By pressing 7 on the keyboard, I'm able to see what my spotlight looks like while I'm working on the project without having to render it. I wish I would have realized this earlier into the creation of this file, as I couldn't figure out why only one spotlight worked whenever I had multiple shining onto the mau5head.

Unfortunately, I had to boolean into the head to dig out the eye socket shape. I did my best to not make it look horrible when smoothed. I ended up trying to improve the final render by digitally painting around the eye in photoshop.

What the head looks like from above

I enjoy messing around with the render settings, so I used both Raytrace shadows and Depth Map shadows and compared them.

Depth Map shadows appeared more realistic and showed up in the reflections of the mau5head:

Raytrace shadows definitely had a beautiful, simplified look to them and made the mau5head appear more shiny, but I didn't like how they didn't appear in the reflection. I probably could have fixed this in settings, but I still preferred the Depth map shadows' realistic look.

This is the final product: 

Prototypes

Later, over on the deadmau5 subreddit, someone complained that I used a font other than Arial Black for the title. I would love to explain to them that I chose a weaker-looking, breakable font that matched the mood of what is supposed to be a SUCK fest rather than a strong, stable font such as AB, but this is what my first prototype looked like (which happened to use AB anyways):

Here are other fonts I tried before settling on the final

The Mauz is Finished

Created the tail - wanted it to look like the new Nick TMNT style - a bit blocky and geometric - With little indents

Yes.. I know it kinda just looks like a worm..

With that, I am finished -

CREEEEEEEP

 This is the angle it is meant to be viewed in regularly:

Well that's that

Mauz can count to 2 now!

Today my crea-tor has bestoweth upon me my arms and hands!

Now I am able to wave them around and grab things, like pie!

Last time I added tread to his shoes: (this resulted in messed up geometry but y'know what?! I DON'T CARE!!!)

Annnnyways... First I fixed the shirt problem by creating a tongue to cover it. Oh, so shiny Phong E...

Then I painstakingly recreated his arm from a cylinder - Now he can proceed counting to two - His favorite hobby

I dig his toothy skeleton, yo

Next I needed to re-create that NURB in polygon form for his left arm

 So I did..arm from cylinder, hand from cube

Here's what he looks like naow- Almost finished! Just needs a tail

This is the current high-quality render: OOOOOohhhh... He's so pretty...

Evil Mouse Shoes...

Built the arms from NURBS curves extruded from circles and built a hand from a cube - No idea how I'm going to attach them yet but I'll worry about it later - Also built the shirt/shorts out of cubes - Now the body goes through the head into the mouth and I can't really fix it without the inside of the mouth looking lumpy

Worry about that later too, I guess..

As of right now, it just looks like he's trying to do some sort of ballet pose...

And, naturally, counting to two.

Will build the other hand later

The shoes were very, VERY problematic - They were easy enough to form out of a cube, and the shoelaces out of CV curves/Nurbs circle extrusion...

But all heck broke loose when I tried to add tread to the bottom of them.  Not only was the tread not working out because my vertexes starting going wacky when smoothed, but I accidentally selected a vertex that was on near the ankle and started twisting it around without knowing it.

When I finally finished the tread, there was a gigantic weird hole with many faces near the back of the shoe - I didn't have enough undos to fix this

So I quit, opened a new file, and copied and pasted an old shoe over - But then it wouldn't texture right - Weird blotches started popping up and they even showed up during the render

Without lighting they looked even worse-

So, instead of building a new shoe, I just deleted all of the weird faces and sewed the shoe back together - I tried this before I tried the copy-pasting but thought it was hopeless so quit.  Then I realized how super hopeless the copy-pasted file was and accepted the fact that my topology wouldn't be the best, but that it's okay.

...Aaaaand now my file won't open at all...
WONDERFUL!!!

Make-a-Mauz!

This is Mauz.  He likes smiling and counting to two.

There may be confusion about the gender if you look at his(?).. chest anatomy here.

I designed it as a girl then later decided it would be a male.  AAAAnyways...

...I thought I'd try to model him.

I started with the head. Then went ears. Then eyes. Then mouth. Then hat.  The hat was (dare I say it??!) fun to UV (because it was easy) and texture.

I also discovered (through Youtubing) how to render with a white background!!!

You must turn on final gathering in the render settings and change the background color of the camera under "Environment" in the Attribute Editor.

Current head render:

The teeth were hard to align no matter how much I changed their pivot points and froze their transformations...

Here is his face without the skin (fur?) - I added this so his insides wouldn't appear yellow when seeing through his massive molars

The ears, hat, and nose were made of cubes - The eyes and the inside and outside head are spheres, and the teeth were cones (because pyramids weren't working!!)  The whiskers were CV curves extruded from a NURBS circle - I may attempt to re-make the head out of a cube. MAYbe.

It will eat all of your children

I am deciding whether to leave his eyes as blank-white surface shaders or add minimal shadow (above) - Also trying to make the gums shiny but not reflective - Will save nit-picking for later, I suppose.

On to the body!