Go home mudbox your drunk

i unwrapped both of my characters ready to send them over to mudbox as stated in my project plan, i still at this point had not decided whether i was going to paint my characters in mudbox (it has a beautiful painting tool) and use it with photoshop to add some detailing and tattoos afterwards, or if i wanted to be adventurous and use the sculpting tool as well to attempt to add higher detail, well, mudbox decided that after seven attempts, the sculpting thing wasn't a good idea.

i can only describe it as mudbox being a little tipsy, because i have no idea about this first incident.

when i first added the male into mudbox it alerted me to a problem with the geometry, which it very helpfully highlighted for me, in this an edge had more than 2 connecting edges, which mudbox cannot subdivide by, if you aren't using subdivision this isn't a problem however, so if i was only painting none of these would matter.

it did this for both of the models and in both cases spoke about the characters hair, i then proceeded to fix the problem and re import, with ruth nothing seemed to fix it so i clicked to import regardless, to mess with her geometry anymore (which had nothing wrong with it in the first place) would of ruined the model in max which i wasn't willing to do after unwrapping her for the 3rd time and removing half of her hair poly's, the male however was fine after a quick poly deletion and 5 sided poly clear up!

i proceeded to sculpt lightly on a subdivision of 3 onto the male character, no problems, exported the normals as a PNG  and added them onto the model, when i rendered it to see how it looked i was greeted by this:

 WHAT IS THAT SERIOUSLY?!, Ive even included the normal map below to show how drunk autodesk decided to be tonight, i know its a bank holiday but come on! all i did was emboss some eyebrows and crease his clothing, which i will now be doing in 3dsmax.

 

i have used mudbox before in my self initiated last year and the programme was a breeze! so user friendly, but this year everything Ive tried to do hasn't worked, Ive had classmates who use mudbox as much as i do look over it and be as baffled as i am (on a sculpting front) if i was doing a realistic style i think this would stop me dead, but as i am doing a semi realistic style based off my illustration style i can work around this problem, i was going to use mudbox for skin tone anyway so its not like i am now not using the programme.

just for the sake of its funny, one attempt decided to turn my female character into a super saiyan from dragonball z:

excellent.