Diary of a Skull Man ~ The Jaw
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DIARY OF A SKULL MAN
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THE BACKGROUND
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ONE DAY/DAY ONE
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THE THIRD BEGINNING
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ADDING AND REFINING
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THE JAW
You gotta have a trap before you can shut it.
By this time, I was feeling very good about what I had created. I knew there were more foramina to make, but I also knew how easy it is to lose the forest for the trees in the refining process. I needed the last major landmark that would help me continue to reshape my model until it felt just right: the jaw. Every new addition helps recast what’s already made in a new light and can help highlight areas I’ve forgotten, neglected or simply didn’t notice weren’t right.
The jaw was trickier than I thought it would be. The teeth by themselves took a great deal of time. It was specifically during the modeling of the teeth that I lamented that I wasn’t modeling a predatory dinosaur. Their teeth are very uniform, and a simple copy-paste-resize-move procedure is usually enough to get you your dinosaur teeth. Human, as well as most mammals, have very elaborately and uniquely shaped teeth. Making them is a great modeling challenge, in this case, of making subtle variations on its neighbors.
Here is where I landed with the jaw after my initial pass:
Now the time had also come to start adding in some texture, both in the sense of adding general bumps and pits, but also for features of the skull that I wouldn’t be able to model. I created a bump map for the front of the skull which created sutures for the various facial bones, but I also used this approach to create the divot for the lacrimosal bone (the small bone just inside the eye socket closest to the nasal bridge), as well as the pin hole foramina that surround the eye socket.
