False accusations suck

A recent SL blog post accusing me of stealing meshes from 3d sites has made me think how i have badly neglected my blog and how i can use it for good.

I can post how i work, and progress shots from recent works to showcase my skills and hopefully provide helpful hints for people who are interested.

So.... below are some screenshots from a statue project i am working on currently. Sadly the statue that the accusing blog post from Vryl Valkrie refers to is on another computer that lies in pieces atm - but i can show you my latest project :)

A Toltec warrior statue (i love statues) modelled using techniques i learned from this tutorial many many moons ago.

First i find suitable front and profile piccies from good ol Google image search, like these (slightly edited for alignment and size)...

The trick is in finding good side and front profiles , then i add them onto planes at right angles in 3dsmax for using as reference to build a basic mesh with.

Then i go about making a basic mesh... by creating a single Plane object, converting it to a editable Poly, and then laboriously copying, positioning, and linking multiple Plane objects to form a basic half face as below...

It takes a bit of time and effort to create a suitable starting mesh like this...for instance this one took me about 6 hrs, however 3dsmax has some great time saving aspects...you may be wondering why only half a face... well Max has a function called "Symmetry" which allows a mesh like this to be easily reflected thusly...

Then I apply another built in function called "TurboSmooth" which has the effect of adding heaps of vertices/lines and smoothing all the hard lines out. You can see the added Vertices and Edges the function creates...

Then its just a matter of Rendering with suitable lighting and shadow settings to get a good look at how everything is falling together so far.As you can see it is far from perfect...the mouth is a little small..some of the crisper detail around the eyes is not quite so good... and of course its lacking a suitable texture (and the rest of the body and head). I will tweak and move and add detail and Vertices/Edges where necessary til it meets my standards. So far its about 6 hrs work and has a long way to go. Previous statues have sometimes taken a couple of weeks off and on - i get distracted easily :P

After its finished i will use similar methods to make a lower resolution Sculptie version for importing into SL. However I will take a 'baked' texture from this version because of its superior detailing/shadows/texturing. This way i get the best of both worlds..a high resolution mesh i can sell on 3d model sites , potentially a suitable mesh for the future in Second Life..and a sculptie version i can start selling in SL straight away.

Here's a quick perspective rendering with some simple texturing noise on the bump map... normally i would create a special bump map in Photoshop and use that instead for getting as close as possible to the original statues texture.

After a lot of work and tweaking.. hopefully i can get a statue that closely reproduces the originals. I wouldn't want to offend a culture with a crass imitation... so i put a lot of effort and time into getting what i think is a pretty good reproduction for people to display with pride. As you can see below it will take some considerable time to finish, however i love what i do and others seem to appreciate the extra effort i put... even if they have no idea of the actual process.

A piccie of the original statues for ya :)