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From the story of Hercules and the centaur Nessus. More showing the digital progression of the piece here.
After a few more iterations on proportions as well as layering in some of the thin layers of muscle, veins and skin folds, the sculpture is getting close to completion. It still needs one more pass at a higher subdivision level to capture some fine details and break up the regularity of the surfaces. I may need to modify the pose a bit as well.
Image rendered with Hypershot.
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.
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.
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.
Here are 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.
NOTE: This talk is a few years old now and the state-of-the-art in computer graphics has moved on since, but many of the ideas are still valid.
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.
Here is a still from a Powerade campaign that I worked on last year at the Mill, London. The campaign was for the Austrailian National Soccer team for the 2006 World Cup. The brief was crazy, they wanted the players to tranform into anatomy men to show the inner working of Powerade. We hammered away on this for a couple of months. I supervised 3d, designed and modeled the anatomy man (Maya and Zbrush), and build tools (MEL) to help our master animator Rob Kuczera efficiently animate 30 or so shots. The end result was interesting, if a little gory.
Information on the Artistic Anatomy course that I teach in London can be found here.