Diary of a Skull Man ~ One Day/Day One
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DIARY OF A SKULL MAN
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THE BACKGROUND
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ONE DAY/DAY ONE
The day had arrived. -
THE THIRD BEGINNING
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ADDING AND REFINING
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THE JAW
One day finally arrived in April 2010. I needed to have a little cartoony skull for a background element for a game. I felt some trepidation because I knew where I wound up almost 10 years earlier. However, I gathered up the confidence I gained in the interim and started working. The main difference this time would be the approach itself.
- I didn’t need accuracy. This was going to be a tiny background element, no more than about 50 pixels wide. That left a huge margin of error. I wasn’t even sure at first if I should even bother modeling it and thought long and hard about whether I should simply draw it, since I knew that I could. I quickly decided to model it, however, because I wasn’t totally sure what I would be doing with the skull, and the 3D model would offer many more animation opportunities.
- I started with primitives. When I began last time, and, it merits noting, with most of my models, I began by rotoscoping the major lines of the model. This time, I began with a ball and started extruding and making divots. To many, perhaps even most modelers, this approach might not seem that novel, but for me it was because, not only do I not usually work that way, but this approach is, in general, a little more difficult with Animation:Master, my chosen animation package. Its use of splines makes “drawing” a model a bit more intuitive than beginning with a lump of primitives and working them into your desired shape.
So within a few hours I created this:
For those of my readers to whom this may mean something, the whole model is only about 1300 patches, with only 500 being devoted to the head itself, the rest is all teeth.
I had accomplished what I set out to do with this model, but beyond that I also liked it and thought that it had immense potential for improvement.