the Crown Of Thorns is complete for the application, Poser.  more images to come soon.  thanks for viewing.

update 05/05/2009

a little preview of one vine closely resembling how the final vines will look. i plan to do a few tweaks to this vine, like add varying length to the thorns and tidy up and detail the ends of the vine a little better—but that’s for later. the background is the rest of the crown used stylistically to frame the one completed vine. the colors are not final—they will be hand painted.  this is just a quick material thrown on to help bring out the detailing that has been painstakingly sculpted around each individual thorn along the vine.  this vine, the shortest of three, has taken me 10-12 non-contiguous hours to sculpt from the blocky geometry seen below.  so, i imagine the other two will each take me almost twice as long!  check the link to my references below for the plant euphorbia splendens after which this crown of thorns is modeled, and feel free to leave comments/constructive critiques at the bottom of this page.

start of new crown

this is my progress so far on the new crown of thorns.  it is constructed entirely of quadrilateral polygons and has a much “cleaner” structure than the previous crown.  this model has a long way to go, but this time around i think i can take more pride in the result and offer a better product—i’m using references (euphorbia splendens), and since i’ve been modeling for a few years now, i have a better understanding of what i’m doing.  blender polygon model, 2008.

old crown of thorns

this is an old version of a crown of thorns model that i am currently (and slowly) remaking.  why remake it?  because it’s a good example of a first-time modeler’s mistakes.  this is, in fact, the first model i ever made.  i decided to sell it through an on-line artist’s community as the vendor smokebox46and2 at Renderosity. the product is used in a program called Poser, and  i sold many copies at $7.50 each (of which i got half) totalling several hundred dollars.  it has recently been removed by Renderosity administration due to it being an “old” item.  because of this, i have decided to remake and improve it.  one flaw with this version is that it was converted to a polygon mesh from NURBS (another type of mesh construction) resulting in a dense model composed entirely of triangular (3-sided) polygons.  i didn’t know it at the time, but in the 3d modeling industry it is generally most acceptable to have a mesh/model composed mostly of quadrilateral (4-sided) polygons.  the “old” and “new” images above don’t have to be contrasted closely to see the difference in mesh density and structure.  another flaw with this model is that one of the vines suffers from, you guessed it, inverted normals.  it isn’t noticeable in this image because i forced display and rendering of back-facing polygons; if i hadn’t, the front sides of the polygons belonging to that vine would not be visible in the viewport (screen workspace), and when rendered, that vine would have rendered darker than the other two vines.  one last thing that dissatisfies me about this model is that i didn’t use any references.  i had no idea that the material used to create the crown of thorns is believed to derive from the plant euphorbia splendens.  NURBS to polygon mesh model, 2001.

this, i think, is my fourth rendition of the chimp and the one i am most satisfied with. there are some major adjustments that i see i need to make, but i think this time i can do it without starting from scratch… again. adjustments i need to make need to be applied to the underlying form, such as the hand, which i think is too flat, straight, or planar—it needs to curve a bit more like the feet. sometimes i get lost in the details and forget about the overall form. luckily, zBrush allows a lot of leeway in respect to making more “global” changes in the overall form of the object while retaining all of the upper-level detail. zBrush renders, 2007.

hand hair test

same info as the head below, except… it’s a hand.

early hair test

this is an early hair simulation test i created in an application i no longer use. without too much effort, this is what i came up with. i also used a normal map and cavity map to test how well the details from my sculpting in zBrush would transfer to another application. in the future, the hair and maps will be applied in blender. render from a previously used 3d application, 2005.

first attempt

only the second model i ever attempted.  as you can see the result is undesirably cartoon-like, hence the multiple attempts (seen above) since then.  this was created before i knew about ZBrush, so it was extremely tedious even to get this amount of form to the model without the ability to sculpt shapes and details, especially for being only my second model.  i’ll get it right one day… one day.

the horse is now fully rigged with a pose-able armature (he has “bones” and can be moved), and is no longer confined to his default stance. of course, the bones won’t be visible in any end product/rendering, i simply did an overlay for education and effect. previously, all images of the horse had been rendered (3d scene captured as a 2d image) in zBrush—this is the first image posted that was rendered in Blender. now that this work is done, i can finally move on to give him some color, and after that, hair, and after that, done with horse production!

look this gift horse in the mouth

a quick view of the pieces that make up the horse’s mouth and a glimpse at some of the finer details i put into the sculpt, which include wrinkles around the eyes, and veins. i threw a couple of temporary colors on the horse for a less sculptured look. i’ll be working on UVs, texturing, and rigging next. i’ve been debating what approach to take for the horse’s body hair (excluding the mane and tail): i could use Blender’s hair simulation (which is only usable within Blender), or i could sculpt and paint the hair directly on the model in zBrush (which would allow the creation of texture maps capturing that detail to use in other programs such as Poser, and Blender, too). I’ll eventually do both, but for now i’m leaning toward the sculpted-painted hair. the next image i post will be of the horse in a pose, taking advantage of his new bones.

re-wired

this image depicts the horse’s new mesh topology (placement of polygons) on the left alongside the old polygon structure for the horse on the right. this “re-topologizing” is done (in zBrush) for a couple of reasons. 1) it helps the order and “flow” of the polygons more closely follow the shape and structure of the final sculpted form—giving better definition of the final shape at lower polygon levels, and 2) allows better deformation (bending) in areas like the joints when i am ready to give him bones for posing and animating. now that the retopologizing work is complete i can do things like texture the horse (give him color and other detailed surface definition), unwrap his UVs to apply that texturing in Blender, rig him for posing and animation (give him bones that deform his legs, head, neck, etc.), and continue on with other models that need to be created for this polo project.

at ease, gemtlemen

a viewport (workspace) render of a horse model i’m creating for a polo project for my uncle. the line-up consists of the horse at base mesh level on the far left at only ~400 quadrilateral polygons all the way to the nearly-completed muscular sculpt on the far right at ~1.5 million polygons. some finer details are still needed before sculpting can be considered finished, which will require even more polygons and new topology for future rigging and animation. zBrush render, 2008.