L'Ancien Regime

I came down with a wicked cold yesterday so I didn't feel like much more than importing the femur, tibia, fibia and foot bones that I'd done earlier. It took a bit of juggling around with scaling etc but it was pretty easy to do. It doesn't look that good at this resolution on the screen. Sometimes you just have to be patient and wait for the good times to come along, which hopefully will arrive when the texturing and rendering take place in high resolution with more dramatic and colorful lighting.

Don't give up! 3d Coat > Zbrush + Mudbox.

There are no simple bones. Each bone has a physignomy that is as unique and powerful as each human face.

http://www.3dscience.com/3D_Models/Human_Anatomy/Collections/Male-Female_Collection.php

Done. Well good enough for the voxel stage. I'll add the other angles since it's almost impossible to find photo references from those angles and without a real skelton it's impossible to figure out what's going on in there. Next; Os Clavicule.

Working with really thin laminates with high relief, particularly at their edges will drive you crazy And thank you Digman for showing me all the ins and outs of the Pose tool. I hated that thing before you showed me how it worked, now I'm actually kinda liking it a lot.

I decided not to bring it in with Symmetry turned on since the scapula is positioned at angle to the ribcage and monkeying around with two of them in symmetry would more trouble than I cared for. When this one is done I'll just clone/flip it over the x axis..

De chao ordo. You tend to start out a section like this very slowly and uncertainly, then build in confidence and speed as you figure out a way to solve the problems that confront you both in subject matter and in medium. That's it for the ribcage for now. Next on the agenda; the scapulae and clavicles... Here's a nice one done in Zbrush by Vishakh67

Lots of pushing and pulling with the Move Tool, shaving smooth with tiny Scrape Tool strokes, Smooth Tool, but the Fill Tool really saves on straightening out the edges.. Dealing with long thin laminates in voxels is always tricky. Long thin CURVED laminates no less. But the edges are rather irregular in real life so..

Thank you very much chingchong. .I'll have a look into that... Actually there's some awesome links in there. That's excellent.

Wow I just came across an AMAZING find. Finding good anatomical references on the internet has been a real chore, particularly for animals, but this morning I found this really nice website by this Rodand Denise; http://www.rodnikkel...k/the-rib-cage/ And it led me to this amazing open source work at Archive.org; The Anatomy Of Domestic Animals by Septimus Sisson. http://archive.org/d...ofdomesti00siss I grabbed it down as a PDF. It's incredible. Now I can take on horse anatomy too. and other domesticated animals; horses, dogs, sheep, oxen and pigs. It's not just osteology but cardiology and circulatory, digestive organs and myology too..

Right now you can move with one of the paint brush settings but the Paint With REctangle, Paint with Closed Spline etc are off limits. Wouldn't it be cool if you could select an area with say the rectangle or closed spline tnen move it in direction you wanted? This would allow for some pretty precise work in move tool.. Also it might be nice to select an area this way and twist and torque it with the transform tool..especially if there were some visible falloff select indicator Oh, wait, the pose tool...Hmmm..

Well this is the last of the ribs extruded on a spline and then imported to voxel room and merged. But there's still a lot of work to be done on them even at the voxel level. the taper of the ribcage itself is not as elegant thanks to the photo model I used and I prefer the shape of my own skelton. which tapers in at the bottom as well as the top unlike the rather inelegant reference image version I copied. Lots of delicate scupting ahead; voxels like to collapse on you when they're very thin like this... even when you're trying to build up the surface. I find Clay = bad, Airbrush = good but it distorts the thin ribbon of voxels from it's curve often rather than just thickening the band. Don't even think of using the Smooth tool. The move tool as always will be indispensable. I'm hiding the sternum as most of the ribs (save the two floating ribs) are attached to it by cartilage requiring that I use the MERGE TO tool in the right click voxel tree drop down menu to make most of the ribcage and the sternum one piece that I can then weld properly, a move I'll postpone as long as I can, to give me the convenience of turning off all the other ribs so I can work on them one at a time. And here's praying I win the $50 million lottery this week so I can buy a $50k supercomputer and all the cool stuff like those Freedom of Teach sculptures at $300 a pop. Not to mention those 3 x 30" Samsung monitors and the 24" Cintique touch screen...

What a big mess today turned out to be; seems the gaps between the vertebrae really were too big and many had to be resized, moved around, and the ribs were all wrong...I was headed to a 26 rib ribcage! it's all sorted out now more or less.

That would be nice for starters but a whole entirely more powerful and obvious measurement system would be great too. Merging could be the start of it definitely.

Good stuff. Thanks a lot for posting this.

very nice.. It's shaping up very well.

I'm going all the way, dude. Do or die. This is just the voxel stage. As everyone complains, voxels are crude. Well I think I've proven here that voxels aren't THAT crude.. But then when I'm finished the entire skelton in voxels I'll move on and retouch everythign in surface mode using Live Clay. This will give me a great mesh for shooting powerful displacement maps. Then I'll autopo all the parts individually and then I'll per pixel paint them for diffuse and normal maps And then I'll start doing renders...of each part individually and then the whole. Then I'll have to sit down and figure out an approach for tendons, ligaments and muscle tissue. Finally, I'll have to work out how to do skin and subcutaneous fat, hair, nails... Probably I'll work out how to rig it and weight the joints so it won't be all screwed up when I pose it. When I'm done then maybe I'll know something about 3d graphics. I think I'll be able to call myself some kind of journeyman in the craft.

very cool you need to post more here.

I was worried this would be difficult to pull off...

What a treat...bringing a test rib mesh in from maya and merging it into the scene then cloning it with symmetry in 3d coat actually worked better than duplicating it at a -1 scale over the x axis in Maya... And moving the voxel rib around to shape its curve is actually easier with the 3d coat Move tool with a smooth falloff than it is to mess with soft selection in Maya.. Fitting the rib into the inferior and superior costal facets and buttressing it with the transverse costal facet onto the tubercle of the rib will be a piece of cake this way. Once again the strength of the voxel approach is made manifest; you get to shift and push and pull things around without any fear of overlapping edges, or tangling vertices or inverting faces past each other the way you do in polygonal meshes...

extruding along a spline.

These are great ideas. Basically I'd love 3d coat to make these changes and a few more so that I can abandon using Maya Polygonal modeling entirely and do all that stuff in 3d coat.

yeah but I was thinking of actually getting rid of the Render Room as is since the renders aren't that good there *in many cases they're actually a lot worse than the regular paint room workspace) and instead selling 3d Coat with Octane embedded right into it, not just with an applink..up the price of 3d coat to accomodate the licensing...

Indigo render would also be a very interesting and powerful candidate for a bundled renderer for 3d coat...at 145 Euros...it's dirt cheap and super powerful It too is both open CL and CUDA compliant. http://www.indigorenderer.com/