Thursday, December 27, 2007

Tree Frog Sculpt

I took a break from the Wonder Woman statue to work on another gift project in the hopes of getting it done by Christmas. I was able to get the sculpt finished in time to bake, wrap and give, although it still needs to be painted, which I will probably get around to doing next week, so the recipient will have to wait a bit :/


Like the other project, I roughed out the basic shape/pose in 3D before starting the wire armature. I started by building a basic frog model in Maya which I added a simple rig to in order to pose it, then exported the posed geometry to zbrush for a quick re-sculpt, fleshing out the volume more and then exported that back into Maya to make some more adjustments and create the wire armature guide. The armature guide helps me in bending the aluminum wire so each segment is the proper length.


I duct taped some aluminum foil to the wire frame to fill out some of the mass of the torso and head.


Sculpting began.


The final sculpt ended up being a bit more hunched over then the original 3D model. Here are some shots after it was baked.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Wonder Woman Statue

I'm currently working on a super sculpey statue of Wonder Woman. This is a gift for a friend. Originally I was going to model it all in Maya and send it off to get a 3D print made but eventually decided to give super sculpey a go. I have rarely used the stuff and thought it would be a good challenge. Here is a rotation of the model in Maya (may need to click to see rotation). Here is the base that was cut out of some scrap wood and two guides created in Maya. One for the length of the different parts of the wire armature and the other for where to drill the holes in the base to hold the armature in place.


Start of the wire armature:

Matching the armature pose to the one modeled in Maya:


I covered the wood stand with super sculpey and sculpted it to resemble stone block flooring. Began adding sculpey to the wire.

At this point I am not sure if I will try matching the toonish style of the Maya model or go for more realistic anatomy.