Diary of a Skull Man ~ Adding and Refining
-
DIARY OF A SKULL MAN
-
THE BACKGROUND
-
ONE DAY/DAY ONE
-
THE THIRD BEGINNING
-
ADDING AND REFINING
Trying to make things better without making them worse. -
THE JAW
At this stage, I started refining the skull as a bit of procrastination. I knew that I’d have to tackle that all-important underside, and I still hadn’t quite gathered up the courage to do so. I added a bit of texture to and changed the color of the teeth, and reshaped the maxilla (the area between the teeth and nose) a bit. But I also knew that if I was too timid about it, I might never get around to doing it at all, so I started slow and easy and added the styloid processes (the thin protrusions right under the ear area). Here is the result.
Feeling emboldened by this, I thought I could move on to another simple structure, the occipital condyles, the two structures that sit just outside the foramen magnum, the large hole at the bottom of the skull which connects to the spine. That went well, so it was time to add the last major facial structure, the septum. From there, I moved on to the pterygoid processes, the indentations that sit right above the last molars. (By the way, at this point the landmarks will get more confusing. I’ll do what I can to be as clear as possible, but this is the reason that all these structures have names. Sorry about that.) I moved there because, again it was a relatively simple extrusion from the existing model. But this was also where things started to get trickier, because it was now time to start adding holes.
The skull has many holes, ‘foramina’ (singular ‘foramen’), and in Animation:Master you really have to add them to the structure. In many other modeling packages, you can subtract holes, meaning you can build some shape, say a column, insert that somewhere into your model and then perform a boolean operation to subtract that shape from the model. The software figures out what the resulting shape should look like. That same process doesn’t exactly work in Animation:Master because its reliance on patch technology where a patch, a 3, 4, or 5 point surface, is strictly defined. Instead, you draw a spline somewhere near the model surface in, at least, the approximate shape of your hole, then disconnect the splines from the existing surface and reconnect them to this new spline through a process called ‘stitching’. Because this can be laborious and often baffling, I was dreading it.
However, I felt like I had done very good prep work. I was taking things slow and proceeding methodically. I added jugular and ovale foramina with not too much effort. Here are 5 different images of the same stage of modeling to show my progress.
