crown

update 03/24/2010

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.