Assyrian bas releif fragment of a king slaugtering lions in unbaked clay

[L'Ancien Regime]

So I wanted a break from the anatomy studies and I was reading Nicholas Penny's excellent book The Materials Of Sculpture

http://www.amazon.co...y/dp/0300065817

and I came across this fascinating fragment from about 650BC with some amazing things in it. I decided to test my skills on it and particularly was looking forward to texturing and ultimately lighting it and rendering it.

http://books.google....0bricks&f=false If page 167 doesn't appear hit reload..

I love antiquities like this. Their fragmentary nature makes them all the more fascinating.

So I laid it out with the best intentions in four layers; substrate, man's body, lion paws, and spear shaft.

Everything went well up to a point; the point being when I started to do greater details using LC in Surface Mode; then I came up with the Nonuniform advisory and sure enough in the details there were abberations, perhaps even holes. I tried the close hole command and crashed it. I tried reverting to Voxels and reducing the polygon count on all layers one by one but still the NonUniform advisory remained.

I did a test Autopo and Merge with NM PerPixel and got a strange mess on the maps. I'm not sure if this had anything to do with the non Uniform business. A big chunk of the NM and diffuse map came out missing while the other half was inverted.

Are there any resources on the Non Uniform problem and how to cure it out there in 3d coat forum or manual?

I need to not only heal these rather numerous aberrations but know how to avoid them in future...

[Tony Nemo]

I'm not clear about the concept of "non-linear", It would seem that some things are inherently non linear if it means non-symmetrical but that can't be right. I did find myself in a non-linear situation and I had to start over. Some clarity here would be welcome.

[L'Ancien Regime]

I'm not clear about the concept of "non-linear", It would seem that some things are inherently non linear if it means non-symmetrical but that can't be right. I did find myself in a non-linear situation and I had to start over. Some clarity here would be welcome.

Well judging from the little holes that appeared like the one I showed you I think it involves a tangling of the mesh in surface mode. Sometimes, particularly with dynamesh these can get pretty radical...

Digman will know.

Digman knows all...

[chingchong]

im maybe wrong, but isnt there an option for making it uniform? i think RMB on layer and then hit "to world space" or something which sounds similar (sorry i dont have program at hand right now)

edit: actually its right click on the layer in the VoxTree and select 'To global space'

[michalis]

To global space, I always use it. Right.

As for sculpting materials and antiquity fragments, I also suggest grecoroman terracottas found in egypt (hellenistic is the more appropriate word, romans had little to do with them except of copying). You may be surprised by the realism of these statuettes. Made before the birth of Christ but their influence echos to the whole christian art. (same goes to the painting of this period of history - fayum portraits)

[L'Ancien Regime]

Global space is pretty good but the problem is that it will resize different layers separately and often differently.

What you want is Uniform Space, not Global Space.

And yeah this mesh got really messed up. Time to retreat from .003 to .002..

What I didn't realize at the time was that I screwed up the proportions of each individual voxel when I unified all 4 layers under a parent then put the Transform Tool on the parent to scale down the thickness of the entire composition on the Z plane. That's what made the voxels non uniform, non cubic. Thank you Chong Chong et al for your advice.

And yeah, Michaelis, Alexandrian period sculpture is supreme, particularly the Alconeus and Ea of the Pergammene school, but this particular fragment took me by surprise. It's from 650BC and there were just these little sophisticated details that I was surprised to encounter at this early period. That and the challenge of making something that looked like a fragement, aged and damaged and in a style that was idiosncratic to its culture, yet reprsentational.. That in itself was a challenge. We'll see if I can pull it off. An arm has to look like an arm but it can't look like a neoclassical French arm if you see what I mean. It has to look Assyrian...

[Tony Nemo]

I've encountered those stippling errors also. Smoothing erases them effectively.

[chingchong]

btw it looks like this warrior wears a watch

[Tony Nemo]

Perhaps an opportunity for an upmarket ad.

[L'Ancien Regime]

btw it looks like this warrior wears a watch

it's a stylish wrist sundial by Tag Heuer.

[L'Ancien Regime]

So after puttering around a bit I made my first 3d Coat custom brush in Photoshop.

It worked OK with Inflate Clay but it really popped out the way I wanted it with Extrude Clay.

Thank you Digman.

And actually it's interesting that this turned out to be the best way to solve this pattern problem in this sculpture because the illustration I'm working from in Penny's Materials of Sculpture was in a chapter calledl "Stamped and Moulded Clay"; it turns out that Assyrian sculptors would carve pattern stamps out of soft stone and use them to push into soft clay to get repeated patterns, and that is what we're doing now digitally. almost 3000 years later. It makes me want to read this chapter more closely and it makes me want to reassess how to approach a lot of other details in this kind of work, like the gold hair ornaments repeated on the king's braided locks of hair...

You can really see that on his robes in this photo from the British Museum

[Tony Nemo]

Large predators just couldn't compete with humans.

[michalis]

A nice way to start, I guess.

Though Digman has some better tools for this job.

[chingchong]

why not making a b/w shape mask for extruding shapes with that mask-option.

Than smoothing the shape-"edges"

and finally a simple greyscale-version of that pic for adding details, again with that mask-option?

[digman]

@ chingchong, There are a number of ways to do things, masking is one and stamping another. The choosing of which varies from sculpt to sculpt...

[L'Ancien Regime]

A nice way to start, I guess.

Though Digman has some better tools for this job.

That's a nice way to go Michalis but if I do it that way I deny myself the sensuous pleasure of sculpting by hand which is really the entire point of the exercise I think. I mean nobody here enjoys the sensuous pleasure of sculpting more than you, right?

[michalis]

I didn't mean not to sculpt on this. Just a simple projection-based way to start.

It's not cheating or something. After all, all the masters used machines in the past.

http://naturalpigmen...CT_ID=655-DURTT

[L'Ancien Regime]

I didn't mean not to sculpt on this. Just a simple projection-based way to start.

It's not cheating or something. After all, all the masters used machines in the past.

http://naturalpigmen...CT_ID=655-DURTT

That is true. And it turns out the hand I made was too small in scale and the forearm too long though the overall substrate was bang on even though I made it freehand...figuring out how to correct that now..