Diary of a Skull Man ~ The Third Beginning

• 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.

Mar 9, 2011 at 11:33 AM

And so, as so often happens to me, I couldn’t leave it alone. I kept seeing what looked to me flaws that had relatively easy solutions, given this current set-up. I felt like I had already cleared all the difficult hurdles and all that I needed to do was refine and tweak, so I easily convinced myself to spend a little more time on it and see if I could make a really nice skull.

With about another 10 hours of work I got this far.

I did quite a lot for this revision. Most notably cutting out the superior and inferior orbital fissures (the holes in the eyes). I also added the nasal spine (the little lip that goes into nasal cavity) and the infraorbital foramen (the little holes right under the eyes). In addition, I added detail right above the teeth giving them some of their signature bumpiness and did a lot smoothing and refining on the rest of the shape. I also added the external auditory meatus (the ear hole), that you can’t really see in the above image.

Here are a few realtime renders of the skull from 3 different vantage points to show off the improved shape and added details. The auditory meatus is visible here and so are the mastoid processes on the underside of the skull.

The area that provided for the biggest modeling challenge was adding the inferior orbital fissure, the hole that goes from inside the eye socket to the back side of the zygomatic bone (the cheek bone). This area had to be thinned out and reshaped considerably from my original pass because it is such a complex shape.