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L'Ancien Regime

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Everything posted by L'Ancien Regime

  1. Finally finished the thoracic vertebrae. Now for the most difficult part of the spine; the tightly packed and convoluted cervical vertebrae. Time for bed. What a crappy week.
  2. I've been thinking it would be better for Andrew to totally ditch the render room, that it's a waste of his time and effort and instead take the dirt cheap ($120) Octane Render and totally integrate it into 3d Coat and then focus his abilities on other areas that would be more fruitful for him and all his customers. Like upgrading autopo to the degree where it would autopo hard edge scanned objects and give them perfect bevels chamfers and weighted edge loops on a Maya #3 smooth key type polygonal surface, basically a subd surface.
  3. When Renderman came out with PTEX, Andrew beat everyone to the draw in instituting it in 3d Coat within a month. Can he, will he do it again???
  4. Yeah I've shrunk half an inch since high school...
  5. A brutal day..I've been cursing like Hitler in the bunker...a Windows update wiped out all the work I did from midnight to 4:00AM. Thanks. I knew the vertebrae would be a complicated task but all my photos and even having the thing right next to me did little to sort out the tangled mass of gnarly bones. so I spent the morning labeling each vertebra from three angles before I could get back to work and start where i'd been set back to at midnight. And the computer hangs...there's delays on each move at this point even after doing a massive resample down to one fifth of the originals. Somehow I keep accidentally turning parts from Voxel to Surface mode. I've learned not to freak out at this as you can still get back with a Ctrl Z even though it says you can't turn back to voxel mode.. This is not just being fussy. As you progress up the spine from the Lumbar 5 to the Cervical 1 there is this gradual progression and change in the fundamental shape of the vertebra and each vertebra has it's own unique physignomy...you could just make them all the same and clone them out and say "good enough" but it's not. It would suck hard.
  6. Uch, it's easier to set this up and do it in 3d coat than it is in Maya...going back and forth and setting things up is a pain in the ass. Just put up the image planes in the coat front and left view and use the clone tool to duplicate the vertebrae from one another, then resize and reshape. I wasn't that aware of the clone tool in the voxel room so I just tended to revert to Maya's ways.
  7. Yeah this is the skeleton of probably a very poor East Indian peasant woman with small delicate bones...it's a lot different than the big simple bulky bones in pictures I'm finding online... This is as far as I want to/ can take this at the voxel level
  8. Like a WWI battle you start the day with high hopes of a breakthrough but it always winds up in an ugly wrestling match with a stubborn opponent. And there's no elegant "standard model" to turn to. Every example seems to be radically different almost like something from a different speces. The body appears to be a jury rigged contraption at times..
  9. So producing all the spinous processes the superior articular, pedicle, transverse processes, and vertebral foramen turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be, a lot easier than the last time I undertook this task over a year ago.. Just about ready to return to 3d coat to merge this stuff into voxels for some detailed scupting.
  10. Nothing will alleviate your lower back pain like a good psoas stretch. Make sure to do it evenly for both sides! Most pain is inflamation of the the muscle sheath. You can calm that down with ibuprofen...$4 for 200pills at the Superstore without a prescription. And the voxel stage of the pelvis is done; time to do the vertebrae..
  11. That will be your psoas muscle Note; I tried saving and exporting the sacrum and hip bone meshes separately but when I autopoed them I had them visible. And as Digman told me...if an object is visible in 3d coat it will be worked on by the program like it was selected...so remember to turn off visibility of any assets you don't want included in an autopo etc.. And loving ghost mode. Very handy.
  12. The front side of the sacrum is simple and elegant. The dorsal sacrum is bizarre.
  13. The dorsal sacrum after quickly sketching in its landmarks...lots of structural mysteries to explore ahead of me.. Oh and if you haven't discovered it yet, and your computer can run it, try Voxels/Cast Shadows for a vastly superior experience sculpting. And as yet all this is still just voxel scupting. I'm going to take the entire project as far as I can in voxels before going back to redo everything at the surface/live clay level...that should provide me with the optimal displacement maps that I can extract before going into per pixel painting..
  14. The sacrum progressed along to the point where I couldn't resist making a save and then a quick experimental autopo, just to see how Andrew's algorithm handled such a topologically complex toroidial object; all those holes! I didn't do anything, no painted weights, no splines, I just let the algorithm do its thing...and it passed with flying colors. Very impressive. And an aside; when you undertake to do the human or any other animal form there's a natural human tendency to become an Aristotelian and seek some ideal human form with ideal proportions, but of course that's absurd. In my simple researches for this I can't believe how much the same parts diverge from one another in their genetic variations. The sacrum particularly seems to be very individualized...there's nothing even close to being a typical sacrum. It's all very strange and a little bit unnerving. Who and what are we anyway? The more I study it, the less I seem to know about what it actually should look like..
  15. This is what I love most about 3d coat and voxels...you need to make a hole? Just poke your finger through it like wet clay...no fuddling around trying to understand the mysteries of topology mathematics..
  16. The sacrum represents more than just the problem of sculpting it as an independent bone here.. It forces me to organize my workspace in preparation for the entire spine development. And the sacrum-hip bone connection is a very tight one that will require boolean subtraction between the sacrum and hip. I had to monkey around quite a bit last night figuring out how to bring in my meshes from Maya for voxelization and still obtain symmetry. I solved that before I went to bed, so now the stage is set for the full development of all the vertebrae in rapid sequence with separate layers for each bone. And with those little technical problems solved I can just spend my morning enjoying sculpting the structural elegance of the sweep of the bones and learning the secrets of the body's engineering... Later near the end I'll carve the rough contact of the sacrum to the hip bone then subtract it from the butted hip bone...
  17. I wrestled with it for hours and I'm still not satisfied but at least now I'm ready to go from voxels to surface mode and Live Clay detailing... Before I went to that step though I thought I'd test it out for it's overall form buy doing another autopo of its latest state, exporting it to Maya and duplicating it on a negative one on the x dimension to assemble a 2/3 complete pelvis. Autopo was to 10,000 polygons..
  18. I needed a break from texturing in light of new stuff I've been learning about using displacement maps and sculpting to a much higher level than voxels allowed with the surface tools, particularly the live clay tools..probably going to redo everything I've done so far to encapsulate everything Digman's been showing me. The pelvis is a damned complex piece of bioengineering. The entire thing manages to act as a platform to support the spine, a cradle to hold the intestines with two little sockets for the hips all thrown in together in one little strangely sculpted pair of hip bones. It's an amazing piece of minimalistic functionalism.. I like flowing back and forth from Maya to 3d Coat and back.
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