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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.
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just for fun.
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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.
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From the story of Hercules and the centaur Nessus. More showing the digital progression of the piece here.
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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.
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Here’s a snapshot of the current state. I have done work to improve the gesture of the piece, trying to add more strength to the pose (rearing higher, chest out, arm back, twisted more, etc).
Also more attention to the legs – it is important to understand the bones, tendons, and ligaments in a horses legs, as they are the primary forms below the knee and elbow. Beyond this there is still a “softening” pass, that includes veins wrinkles and those small variations that keep anatomical forms from being perfectly smooth. And obviously I am going to have to address the hair and tail at some point. Perhaps soon?
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If you are interested in this sort of thing, here is where the model started. Click on the images to see the complete evolution. On the far right you see I started with a base human model I have lying around and built a low-resolution horse proxy around it. This was fused (second image from R to L), and refined in Zbrush. The final ‘bind pose’, from Zbrush, is shown on the left.
today – refinements all around. Anatomy revisions to the way the obliques and back connect into the horse’s body. Also refined the legs, increased the size of the rear hooves, adjusted the sculpting around the horse’s elbow, and moved the left arm back (not shown). getting closer…
Here are a couple renders showing the point the upper body is at. For the most part, I am happy with the anatomy, there is still a bit of refining to do and another pass of details like veins and wrinkles, but the structure is sound. The next stage is going to be refining the details of the horse anatomy and then I will address the hair and tail, two parts that will give the piece a strong sense of motion (I hope).
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.
