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Samples from my Bodies in Motion image library are now online. The library was created to capture high-quality, dynamic figure reference for artists. The human figure is extremely complex and its form is so variable during motion that high-quality reference is essential for capturing that anatomical complexity. The full library is over 20,000 images so I can only put a sample of images online to start, but I hope you find it interesting and useful!

link to Bodies in Motion

The plates from Duchenne de Boulogne’s Le Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (ca 1876) have been added to the reference library. The images are curious and not entirely pleasant to look at, but useful for artists interested in the extremes of human facial expressions. Duchenne would use electro-stimulation to activate individual facial muscles in willing but not entirely happy subjects.
Link to image gallery.

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I will be giving a lecture at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects as part of an Anatomy Masters evening on the 22nd of October. I will be one of four speakers presenting that evening and admission is free, so you will definitely get your money’s worth! The content is evolving but my talk will focus on comparative anatomy. More details to come….

I will be giving an intensive two-day anatomy course at the The National Animation and Design Centre in Montreal, Canada on the 24th and 25th of August 2009. The course is open the public and industry professionals in and around Montreal. If you have a desire to deepen your knowledge of anatomy and improve your character skills, please stop by, I hope to see you there.

• course page at Centre N.A.D.
  
• More information on the Anatomy for Digital Artists course

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Here is an image of my latest digital sculpture, The Death of the Centaur. The sculpture depicts the moment when the king of the centaurs, Chiron, is struck down by an errant volley of Hercules’ poisoned arrows.

Chiron originally appears in Greek mythology as an exemplar of wisdom and learning, tutoring many of the legendary Greek heroes including Achilles, Jason, Theseus, and Hercules. He meets his end at the hands of Hercules who, during a skirmish with unruly centaurs, accidentally wounds Chiron with an arrow poisoned with Hydra blood. Being immortal Chiron can’t die, but lives in agony until he selflessly barters his immortality for Prometheus‘ freedom (note: I have take small liberties with the original story in my depiction of events). Chiron subsequently makes appearances in other stories including Dante’s Inferno, where he guards the seventh level of hell, and in Goethe’s Faust.

Click on the thumbnail above for a high resolution image of the sculpture (2048×1760 pixels). Use the green arrow at the bottom of the lightbox to enlarge the image. I have provided it at high resolution so that you can (hopefully) appreciate some of the fine details. For more images from the construction process, see the Death of the Centaur development page.

Image rendered with Hypershot

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Here is an image from a current project, “Death of the Centaur”. The piece is still in progress, so I am starting a work-in-progress thread that will document the sculpture at various stages of execution, along with a couple time-lapse videos of the creation and preliminary sketches for the piece. You can find the WIP page here.

I will be presenting a two-day Artistic Anatomy Masterclass on 2-3 April 2009, at the Moving Picture Companies screening room in central London, sponsored by Escape Studios . The sessions will be VERY intense (but fun), so get your coffee, notepads and sketchbooks ready. I hope to see you there!

For more information and booking visit Escape Studios’ registration page

FOLLOW-UP

The April anatomy masterclass was a great success and every attendee left packed full of new anatomy knowledge. If you missed this course but are interested in attending a future masterclass in London please send me a quick note expressing interest. The more interest there is the sooner I can offer another course. Thanks!

Here is a comp of a small maquette I put together as a test for an upcoming project. It is loosely inspired by the ballerina sketch in the Drawings section. I am not  happy with the concept just yet, but time permitting, you may see a full version of this piece executed sometime in the new year. Happy Holidays.

I finally found the time to photograph the figure sculpture from my Tate Modern lecture.
Material: marble resin with iPod
Size: life-sized

Images of the casting process can be seen here

…with excerpts from William Rimmer’s Art Anatomy, 1877, and rare female anatomy plates from Dr. Paul Richer’s Nouvelle Anatomie du Corps Humain, Vol. II , 1920. Both are classics of artistic anatomy and great learning resources.

Here are a couple images of a digital sculpture that I created for a tutorial in Issue 105 of 3dWorld magazine. The tutorial covers the fundamentals of sculpting the female figure in Zbrush. Both images were rendered with Hypershot.

This is the final image of the Winged Lion. After quite a few requests I have decided to make some of my images available as prints. The Winged Lion is the first. You can find the prints, rendered at a crisp 7000×4600 pixels, at the Cafe Press store here.

Here are a few images of my latest sculpture, shown in clay above, which I unveiled during my lecture at the Tate Modern on “Bit to Atoms - The Process and Evolution of Digital Sculpture“. During the lecture I talked about the process of making the piece - first creating a digital maquette in Zbrush to establish the balance, weight, and proportions of the figure, and then using that digital data (shown below) as a guide for constructing the full-sized figure sculpture in clay. Here are a few views of the digital maquette and a timelapse of the clay construction.

click below to view the timelapse construction of the life-sized clay sculpture.

Movie - Timelapse Construction

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Copyright © 2008 Scott Eaton

I recently added a gallery showing a few images from the process of casting the Bits to Atoms sculpture in bonded marble. Click the image to go to the gallery. Also check out the timelapse movie at the end of this post to see the construction of the clay model.

The first of three of my lessons in Figurative Sculpture is now live on Pixologic’s site.  This lesson covers the fundamentals of sculpting and studying from reference, and walks through the process of creating the ‘Study of Milon de Crotone‘. If you are interested in figure sculpture check it out. Stay tuned for part II, which will cover sculpting from life, and is closely related to some of the work I am showing at the Tate Modern lecture on the 25th of March.

A special thanks to the Pixologic team who did a fantastic job formating and putting the lesson together.

I will be giving a lecture at the Tate Modern on the 25th of March entitled:

Bits to Atoms - the Process and Evolution of Digital Sculpture

The talk broadly covers the history of figurative sculpture, techniques of digital sculpture and methods of prototyping digital sculpture. I will also be showing a new piece that I have been working on for the last couple months with a little behind the scenes “making of”.

Follow-up

The sell-out talk was a great success. Thanks to everyone who attended. For anyone who missed the talk, the Tate Modern recorded the presentations and made them available as a webcast here. My presentation is the second and begins at 00:46:00.

Read the rest of this entry »

Additional view of my digital scupture of Milon de Crotone. Click on the images for a larger view.

Phil is finally out of kiln and photographed in the studio with some decent lighting.

click on images to view movies

Here are two short movies captured from Zbrush showing the construction and refinement of the human figure. The movie on the left shows the progression a female figure from very low resolution to a passable human form. The movie on the right shows the development of a heroic male torso and gives some insight into how anatomy is placed and constructed on a torso. The movie starts with a smooth, undeveloped model and first refines the large planes of the body. Once these are in place landmarks are sketched onto the model which act as guides for placing the muscle groups. The rest of the movie shows the build-up and refinement of the anatomy. The movie of the female figure is roughly ten minutes long and captures a three hour modeling session, the torso movie is seven minutes long and captures a slightly shorter modeling session.

I am currently at Siggraph 2007 in SanDiego giving presentation on behalf of Pixar for the RenderMan Certified Courseware that I have been developing at Escape Studios with co-author Andy Cadey. I am also giving presentations for Pixologic, the company behind Zbrush, announcing a series of anatomy lectures that I will be developing for them in the Autumn. The lectures will be released once a month over the next year covering critical aspects of artist anatomy and figurative scultpure. They will be freely available to the public on ZbrushCentral.

A couple images of my digital sculpture of Prometheus. The piece is my own interpretation of the Prometheus myth, and is not based on any existing sculptures. I have given a few talks about “the making of”, including one on Digital Sculpture at the Tate Modern in London in September 2006. I sync’ed my slides to the Tate’s podcast of the lecture, you can check it out here (a few of the animations and demonstrations are missing but you should get the idea). It talks about both the artistic and technical progression of the sculpture from concept development to modeling, rendering, and compositing. If you are especially interested in the rendering process you can also check a detailed “Rendering of’ Prometheus” tutorial using RenderMan for Maya.

Here is an image of ‘the Archer,’ which I created in Maya and Zbrush as an anatomy study. The process was documented in a tutorial for 3dWorld magazine (issue ??). The tutorial covers the critical anatomical knowledge required to construct realistic human figures. The tutorial is here , and in the same issue I wrote an accompanying article on human anatomy for digital artists.