France
KoreaDigital Maquette: Flight
By Ryan Kingslien in Artist's Series, Transpose, sculpting | 5 comments
Click the image above to watch the movie.
Maquettes
Maquettes are quick sculpts that artists have done for centuries to “pre-visualize” the final product. Wikipedia says:
A maquette (French word for scale model, sometimes referred to by the Italian name bozzetto) is a small scale model for a finished sculpture or architectural work. It is used to visualise and test shapes and ideas without incurring the cost and effort of producing a full scale product. It is the analogue of the painter’s cartoon or sketch.
Maquettes can be 6 inches or they can be 6 feet depending on the final size of the sculpture or building. They can be made from clay, foam, cardboard, plaster and whatever else you can imagine.
The size and the material are not important. What is important and common to all maquettes, as I am refering to them, is that they are all designed to get an idea across in the simpliest manner possible with the least expense possible.
Sketching
As wikipedia mentioned, maquettes are a sculptor’s analogue to a sketch. However, what, exactly, is a sketch?
If you have not seen Bill Buxton’s book Sketching User Experiences I suggest you check it out.
In his book, Mr. Buxton lists several components that are crucial to understanding what a sketch is. I list a few of the elements he identifies below:
- Quick
- Timely
- Inexpensive
- Disposable
- Plentiful
Sketching Your Sculpt: Digital Maquettes
Our goal, with a maquette, is to make it as fast as possible with as much ease as possible. In other words, sketch your sculpts. To do this, we need to start getting rid of some pre-conceptions!
The first idea to throw out is getting perfect deformation at the elbows!
The second idea we need to throw out is to worry about topology or unnecessary details such as ears, the shape of the nose, ect..
Again, our goal is to sketch our sculpt. To do this we need to convey the pose with as little information as possible.
To help you with that goal, I have provided a .ZTL of a simple female shape that is built for fast transposing.
Click here to download the DemoMaquette_Female model
For some interesting video’s of Mr. Buxton’s talks click here.
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spaceboy412 | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
pretty sweet trick using the action line like a lever, is that using the Alt button at all as well? Is that in the wiki? I initially got into zbrush for the very reason of making maquettes for drawing purposes, can’t say I draw as much now though, thanks zbrush!
Ryan Kingslien | Dec 13, 2007 | Reply
Hey Spaceboy, in this case, I am not using the ALT button. I’m not 100% sure if its in the docs or not but it is pretty useful, huh?
Slashpot | Dec 15, 2007 | Reply
This is excellent. Great stuff Ryan. I guess it might sound strange making a maquette for a ZBrush model, especially if that model was to be used as a maquette in the first place! In fact this would still be impractical but for the transpose tools. I got into Z for this very reason, but got hooked on modeling as an end in itself.
3D sketching might just turn out to be rather a revolutionary idea. You can’t tell me Michelangelo wouldn’t have used it if he had it, (except that you don’t have a 16th century Italian version).
Keep ‘em coming Ryan, you’re getting some great articles in here, and Lo! there’s an RSS link down there now! Thanks!
Ryan Kingslien | Dec 15, 2007 | Reply
Hey Slashpot, I’m just waiting for the day you can print these models!
Darrell Armstead | Dec 17, 2007 | Reply
Great Tutorial. I had been having problems with learning to use the tools like this in ZBrush but its great to see things like this. Keep’em comming.
Thanks.