First A Dinosaur And Now - Professor X?!?

Yikes - well these pics are at least a week old (if not, perhaps, a little... more) but that's actually because I've been too busy sculpting to post :) (although not all of that sculpting was on CJ....)

So when we last left our intrepid Prawnling I'd roughed in the basic sculpt and it was onto the fun of refining things! :)

For which I decided the best place to start was at the top!

Sadly this meant popping off those cute temporary skewer stick antennae and undoing a lot of the nice details I was happy with when I first sculpted CJ's head before Christmas....

Rake - smooth, rake - smooth and thus...

Is it just me, or is CJ starting to look a little like Professor Xavier?

Kojak?

Egghead?

His profile was looking pretty good so I decided to compare it to my reference pic again in Photoshop. But in playing with the opacity filters over the two pictures I realized that it was sometimes hard to tell what was the edge of the reference photo and what was the edge of the sculpt.

So I took a fresh layer, lowered the opacity, and traced over the reference photo with a nice, bright colour like so. Then I repeated the process with my latest photo of the sculpt.

Then I set the opacity on both to 50% and overlapped them
(I had to change the green to blue because otherwise the red and green cancelled each other out where they overlapped. This is me failing Colour Theory 101)

So now the trick is to adjust the sculpt till the red lines match up with the blue ones (at least the head and torso lines - the "scaffolding" that's holding CJ up actually prevents me from sliding the legs into the exact same position as the ref pic).

I have had a few second thoughts about using this Photoshop overlay method quite so much. On the one hand it's quite helpful in showing me errors. On the other hand I wonder if it's really helping train my eye to analyze the shapes and forms correctly or am I just using it as a crutch?

Yet it's a common sculpting trick to hold a mirror up to your work in order to recognize irregularities in the sculpture that your mind has otherwise become desensitized to. Is this not just a high-tech mirror? I wonder...

Sculpting To Soothe The Soul...

So I made sure I made some time for CJ yesterday. Barely an hour but it felt really good (and no more procrastination-guilt).

I mentioned in passing in my last post that I wanted to come up with a way of making sure that any further photos I took for the purpose of comparing the sculpt against the reference photos I took from the same position. This way I’d know that any differences were due changes in the sculpture, and not from seeing things from slightly different angles, etc.

So I started off the session yesterday by marking CJ’s current position on the floor of the workshop. Now, should I have to move him out of the way for something I’ll know I’ll get him back in the same spot.

Then I moved a stool back a few feet from CJ and marked its position as well (and now you can see my father’s side of the workshop...).

It was especially important to mark the stool’s position since I move/use it quite frequently. I don’t always sit on it but I do use it a lot – it’s at the exact perfect height to hold tools and a small bowl of clay so it saves me having to step back and/or having my hands full when I want to switch rapidly between two or three tools.

Anyways, with the stool on the other side of the room, I can sit on it and fit CJ in his entirety comfortably into the viewfinder of the camera. By lining his base up with the bottom corner of the screen now I know I’m taking the shots from pretty much the same place each time.

And when I don’t want to go back into the other room and run through all the trouble of taking the pic into Photoshop to compare, I’ve discovered I can do this…

Crude, yes, (it's just me holding the reference pic up in front of the camera, adjusting the distance till it and the sculpt looked the same size) but quite effective. For instance I could see yesterday that the shape of CJ’s head wasn’t quite right. It needed to be higher in the front and rounder in the back…

So I started in on rounding off and reshaping his head.

I was really having fun with it, but I stopped myself before I could get too carried away. One of the sculpting tips I received at the IMATS in Europe was to block in and refine the WHOLE general shape first before creating too much detail in one area. I’ve already gone a bit further with the head than the rest of CJ’s body than I probably should have but that’s OK – it’s letting some of his “personality” come through, and I find it more motivating to work on him now that he has a recognizable face. But I really do need to bring the rest of the sculpt up to the level of the head now, before proceeding any further.

So I removed CJ’s arms for now to have easier access to his torso, and filled in more of the back of his neck.

I think the plan for the next little bit is to work on refining his torso, then move onto the limbs before circling back to further refine his head and neck again.

Close... But No Fuel Cylinder...

Here’s a pack of Prawn podiatry pics!

*wiggles toes* And this little Prawnling went to market, and this little Prawnling stayed home… *coughs*

I mean … um, more sculpt pics. You’ll see a number of fairly major changes very quickly – something was bugging me (no pun intended) about the sculpt (mainly the head) but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what exactly. So I was trying to rough in a number of the basic forms to see if I could get my head around the problem.

I finally decided the head was too big – or at least that I should scale back and take another run at it. The result reminded me of some bizarre combo of Kermit The Frog and Brundle-Fly @_@

But that was evidently what I had needed to do because things soon started to head in a better direction… Brundle-Frog was happily starting to look more like CJ

Something was STILL bothering me about the sculpture though. I went back through all my reference material but to no avail. Besides an overwhelming feeling that something was ….off none of my pictures were helping me figure out what.

So I turned back to the Internet, on the off chance my Google-fu could unearth perhaps some new material.

And I found some! I found a near perfect pic in fact – which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse.

On an online CG magazine I found an article about District 9 – including the following CGI character sheet of CJ.

Finally! An in-focus, standing-still shot, where he didn’t have his little hands in front of his chest!
(which is adorable as far as poses go, but doesn't make for the greatest reference picture...)

And that’s when I realized what the problem was…. There was something wrong with the armature itself.

Here’s the CJ sculpt as we last saw him, followed by the side CG shot, and then the two superimposed…

Basically I'd made my CJ too straight and tall – closer to the proportions of a human than those super-curvy Prawns (that spine’s not even an ‘S’ curve – more like a double ‘M’ curve… :P )

The hips could be fixed without removing all the clay but to realign the arms into the proper position I would need to remove all the clay from the shoulders. In other words – back to square one :P

Well ... FOOK.