Diary of a Skull Man ~ The Background

• DIARY OF A SKULL MAN

  Join me on a journey not quite as far as into the human mind... just a few millimeters outside of it.

• THE BACKGROUND

  Step 1: Take a step backwards.

• ONE DAY/DAY ONE

  The day had arrived.

• THE THIRD BEGINNING

  Let's get on with this, already.

• ADDING AND REFINING

  Trying to make things better without making them worse.

• THE JAW

  You gotta have a trap before you can shut it.

This being the Internet, of course what I told you wasn’t completely true. The fact is, I had tried once before to model a human skull, but I got stuck. Here are AO and wireframe renderings of a skull I began working on in mid-2001.

Obviously, I never refined it. There are many lumps and surfacing defects that would have eventually been worked away during a tweaking process, but I never got there. There were 3 basic reasons for this:

1. The area between the eye socket and the nasal cavity. I had created a ridge there due to my modeling process that didn’t belong there and that I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of. This area would have required extensive remodeling, and at the time, I wasn’t sure how I would be able to do it. In other words, This little area represented the limit of my modeling knowledge.
2. The many processes, fenestra, and holes at the bottom of the skull. There are dozens of bewildering features on the underside of the cranium and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to make them satisfactorily, but more importantly, I knew that I couldn’t complete them in any decent amount of time.
3. The overall look of the skull was wrong. I had been working from reference images as rotoscopes. As a result, the shapes that I was making were too faithful to those images but making a wrong impression of the actual object. It was turning out to be too much of a bad copy.

I had gone too far with it to fix its defects and felt too discouraged by having met my own limitations so clearly. I set it aside and hoped that I would return to it one day.