The Hidden Face

Its finallly arrived: I will probably get a larger one of print of this at life sized- and will use this version to play with some skrimshaw ideas.

More Mesh stock

Fish :Pitt Rivers, Oxford

Bearded Vulture skull : Pitt Rivers, Oxford

Hominid skull : Natural History Museum, London

Elephant skull : Natural History Museum, London

Sea Mammal : Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

Leonardo Da Vinci alcove Sculpture : Fierenze/Florence.

Wierd Result from : Natural History Museum, London

Mastidon/early Elephant skull : Natural History Museum, London

Raw Material

Some  images have been processed  from  my European trip.

Baboon skull - raw data

Human Remains

Neckbone

Vervet Monkey Skull

Whale skull from  Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford

These are going to be  reworked in 3DCoat and printed out in 3D, good stock to work from.

Momento Mori Mask:HiddenFace

Seeing the form within the imperfection –
When a traditional sculptor who works in stone chooses the material to start their piece from, they study  the raw rock to see  the  forms within it -  this along with the inherent flaws of the material dictate the direction to where the work progresses ( -Michelangelo)
I use a similar premise with working in the digital – an example with the “Mask” the one side of the face had completely lost all detail in the translation from 2D to 3D – within those forms – I then re-explored the shapes initially mirroring the sides of the face creating a symmetrical face – that didn’t seem to work so I wound up re-sculpting the right hand degraded side into the skull forms I could see from his underlying bone structure.
I also continued to refine and detail the left hand side of the face building in more detail, looking at my photographic reference.

BaseMesh

Base mesh from  photogrametry source - really messy and distorted, full of flaws, which I explore further.

Seeing the forms within the medium.

A first pass clean up and reconstruction of the base form -  initially trying a symetry version of the cleaner  less distorted side of the face..

Skull is found

 Then - seeing within the flaws the underlying structure of the skull emerged.

FinalSculpt- The Hidden Face.

Finally finishing the vanitas adding in fine details to the skull and the fleshy side of the face.

Whale Cairn Update

The concept  has changed somewhat deciced to  remove the environment map  shader  from the whale  body- and assigened a bone white material -  I also added the blood pool  which is very much in  keeping withe the original   whale which was torn apart by sharks  on  the high tide.

Printing in Glass video from Shapeways

Beta Testing : Video Trace

Busy beta testing Video Trace at the moment as well as actully writing up my exegesis - the video below is a lecture by the princple architect Anton van den Hengel - which shows a great deal of information on Video trace.

I also suggest looking at van den Hengels' paper from Siggraph 07 for the science and math side of the application/technical demo.

Alternative stereo photogrammetry app: Arc3D

Pretty good looking results from this application - it seems very similar to 3Dsee.
It seems unsupported at the moment as the installed application crashed when I attempted to run some test data through it. Bah  a  pity  as some of the earlier results look very good.

3D model of the statue of Mercator at the city hall in Leuven, based on a 3D photography system www.arc3d.be

Whale Cairn

Progress update:
A new piece based on photogrammetry data shot of a (dead) beached whale on Frasier which I photographed last year- I am now working on putting together the real-time scene together in Unity engine.

I am looking at how I want to explore and develop the space - thinking of a large virtual open environment for this piece. I have finished reworking the base data and have created optimised engine ready version of the piece- the above screen shots are from 3DCoat showing my progression.

PRIX ARS SUBMISSION -DIGITAL MEMENTO MORI: BIRDSKULL_GALLERY.EXE

A HYBRID SCULPTING PRACTICE THAT REFIGURES THE ORIGINAL SOURCE MATERIAL, TRANSPORTING THE THEME OF “MEMENTO MORI” INTO THE DIGITAL.

I finally submitted all the information required for Ars Electronica - PRIX ARS under the hybrid art category.

The submission consisted of a video documenting the processes used to create and display my interpretation of sculptural momento mori into the digital. Involving my processes of transposing physical pieces from the actual through into the virtual, re-interpreted the pieces in the virtual medium resulting in the BirdSkull_Gallery.exe for final display of the sculpts. BirdSkull_Gallery.exe is one of a series of digital sculptural pieces that explores the interchange between the analogue (actual) and the digital.
The work appropriates scientific and engineering technologies of stereo photogrammetry to reinterpret the physical object, adapting it into the new context of digital sculpture. I use a photogrammetric capturing method to capture the pieces rather than create observation driven hand sculpted models relying on my artist’s eye to representation of the subject matter.
The photogrammetry process captures the inherent natural errors of the original sometimes missed by observation. It is notable that in the photogrammetry translation process that I use, there can be errors in translation from the 2D into the 3D. I use that “erroneous data “as an abstraction process in the conversion of the piece into the virtual medium. As most of the sculptural work takes place in this virtual medium it seems natural that the pieces should be displayed and distributed in a digital medium very similar to their medium of adaptation, the virtual space. With the BirdSkull_Gallery.exe I have reinterpreted two aspects a crow skull (based on the same data set), namely Crowskull _Scrimshaw and Birdskull Redux v1.1.
These pieces have been integrated into a virtual 'cave' which is created from erroneous photogrammetry data of a stuffed crow captured from the Brisbane Natural History Museum collection.
The exploration of bones and nature stems from my early childhood in post colonial Africa - I have always seen bones as beautiful sculptures as well as reminders of life’s fragility. I remember visiting friends ranch as 5 or 6 year old and seeing an elephant skull on the front lawn and thinking how amazing it was and wanting one for my own room. My work reminisces on memories of bones being commonly used as ornamentation and have always been a part of my physical environment. Today as a practicing digital sculptor I can capture elements of this childhood obsession - creating virtual homage's to creatures that I once collected and performed taxidermy on.
My practice reflects my desire to pay homage to nature. The ability to create a virtual sculpture garden is part of this process of reflection where technology enables one to collect and create these types of spaces, resulting in virtual galleries such as BirdSkull_Gallery. exe.

Prix Ars working:

I have started reconstruction of a whale beached off of Frasier island, which I photographed last year. I rebuilt the mesh data in 3D voxel space - made up of components of the original stranded whale converted into 3D from the photogrametry.


GoatsSkull Conversion : A verysuccesfull conversion of photogrammetry data into mesh - I will be looking at this element in the next few months.