Sculpties Do's and Don'ts

Ok so I have read a ton of threads on sculpties and have spent many many evenings figuring out the best way to create them..well for me that is..and I wanted to share a bit with whoever happens to read this..
I have a frog example and used maya as well as zbrush to create it. I did the textures in zbrush and photoshop. For the frog head I stared with a 32 x 32 poly sphere - I molded the head in zbrush and then brought the object into Maya. From there I exported the sculptie texture. The arms and legs were created using curves/nurbs modeling in maya. Initially I thought I could model the entire frog in maya or zbrush, this did not work and created a sculptie mess. When I figured out that I had to create specific parts - the arms, legs, toes, belly, head all separately I got much better results. Each part was made into a unique sculptie texture, brought into sl and put together again. White creating the nurbs arms and legs I found that I had to close seams in the model - although there was a bit of warping at the ends with the sculptie, a good texture covered this up well.

A few things - I am not a fan of nurbs modeling and much prefer polygon modeling - it is more efficient and easier and faster to create desired results. However when I created a poly model and then made it into a nurbs model in maya I got way too many parts and had a hard time connecting them together. So although the head of the frog seemed to work as a polygon model from zbrush, any other polygon model like making the arms or legs did not work and had to be done using curves/nurbs.

Texturing was done using uv maps in zbrush and maya and then the textures were brought into photoshop for fine tuning..

Anyway, if you want to see the frog for real, seach for him in zooby's.

He is sitting by the pond.

What a cut little frog! Great texturing job. I am just learning ZBrush and it's exciting to be able to paint right onto the 3D model.

I am very happy to see how well the sculpties blend into each other. There is no jumping or weird artifacts when they overlap, it is a very smooth intersection.

His little toes are so cute!

Dearly Darling,

That is too precious! I'm so jealous!

Ever Yours,

Mrs. Showdog Tiger

Wow!

I love that frog!!!

Please make it available somehow, Second Life lakes and streams everywhere are in desperate need!

*imagines it hopping just a bit and making happy froggie noises*

I will be making the frog available at Zooby's. Either tonight or tomorrow night. The frog randomly sticks his tongue out - not too often but every now and again. He blinks and when you click on him he makes frog sounds. He does not hop. Not yet atleast. I need to spend time now working on animating prims - an annoying task and I don't think can be done at the moment since he has so many individual toes. Each toe will not move in sync. If anyone has any suggestions on how to animate a multi prim object - (he is really only 30 prims) smoothly please by all means IM me.. Oh and he chats and you can wear him on your shoulder and walk around with him.