Before I sculpt and 3D-print Furahan life forms, here is the 'Mekon'!

I use a variety of tools to prepare paintings of Furahan animals. Often, a few sketches were all that was needed to position an animal in its environment, ready for painting. But sometimes I needed to get a better feeling for the shape of an, or for where light should make way for shadow, or where I should place all six, or all twenty-four, legs of an animal. In such cases, I made a model, most often a digital one. I bought Zbrush back in 2009, based on its fame and use by professionals. However, it was difficult to learn and the user interface seemed designed to scare you away. Still, I did use it, limiting myself to organic scape sculpting.

Blender sculpt and painting of a droodle (copyright Gert van Dijk) 

Here is an example of a Zbrush model as well as the painting that it was made for: the droodle (Lorica segmentosa), a painting later chosen as the cover of the Furaha book (reviews: see here!). If you compare the two images, you will see that the 3D model is not very detailed. There was no need for details, because the model was only meant as a fairly rough aid for a painting. I actually provided more details than necessary, because sculpting was fun (provided ZBrush did what I wanted). I had an urge to do more with such sculpts, but The Book had preference. Once The Book was published, I could do other things: I branched into a different style of painting, played with animation again (here and here), and other things besides. Still, wouldn’t it be nice to have a fairly large model of a rusp, or of a marblebill?

I could of course sculpt non-digitally; my earlier experiment with dinosaur sculpting was done with Furahan animals in mind. One consideration in all this was whether I could make multiple copies of a sculpt. With classical sculpting, that would require moulds and casting, possible but laborious. The alternative might be 3D printing, and, although it was clear that that would not be easy either, I decided to experiment with that. 3D printing starts with good models, meaning good modelling software. I never became good at ZBrush. Its awkward interface was never overhauled, and instead of buying it once you now have to rent it, a business model I dislike. The alternative was Blender, which is totally free and offers much more than just sculpting; you could make a professional animation film using Blender as the only software! 
     
I started by modifying the old droodle sculpt, but also decided to start a sculpt from scratch in Blender. I did not choose a Furahan animal, because, knowing myself, I would set my targets too high, so it would be easier to start with something allowed to go wrong (yes, that is probably neurotic). This time it wasn’t a dinosaur, but a character from a comic I grew up with: the Mekon! The Mekon is an alien humanoid, and the arch enemy from the very English space hero ‘Dan Dare’. We are talking the 50s and 60s now; here is a link to an extensive website. I have written a very short post on the Dan Dare comic before, drawing attention to the quality of the artwork in a depiction of an alien forest. 

 

The Mekon!

Here is a view of the Mekon: the character was bred to be a superintelligent ruler. In spite of his enormous brain, he acted as silly as any James Bond supervillain: instead of killing Dan Dare, his archenemy, on sight, The Mekon usually first explains all his plans and then leaves the hero, who promptly escapes. Great fun!

Blender sculpts of the Mekon 

Here are some screen shots of the progression of my Mekon Blender sculpt. I found that my knowledge of human musculoskeletal anatomy came in handy when sculpting a humanoid. In the comics, the Mekon has extremely thin limbs, suggesting feeble bones and almost no muscles. Without thinking about it much, my version evolved towards thin but well-defined muscles. I could not help giving the Mekon a sizeable chest, thinking that that massive brain would need a lot of oxygen. He also has strong muscles in his neck to balance that gigantic skull.

Mekon model

Here is that model imported into Vue. I gave the model an overall green colour but otherwise did not bother with colour.  

Right; so how about the 3D prints? I bought a Creality K1C 3D printer, for those of you who know about such things. My first few weeks of 3D printing led me to conclude that enjoying 3D printing requires a considerable ability to tolerate frustration. Within the first week I had to dismantle the print head because the filament was stuck. I had a recurring problem with the print head kicking over parts of the print, first because the print head knocked over the supports -nneded under parts that stick out sideways-, and after I solved that, the print head knocked the parts off their supports. I think I solved that too.

This type of 3D printer lays down molten material layer by layer; the bad news is that you can usually see those layers. The solutions include filling the gaps between layers or sanding them down, but that is a lot of work and risks sanding away all your nice details!

Here are examples of droodle 3D prints. The white material is slightly translucent, which means you hardly see layer lines, but you do not see other details well either. The orange / brown material is less translucent, which makes it easier see details (and flaws). 

Mekon 3D prints

The larger of these two Mekons lost one arm because of the ‘knocking off’ problem. Its head is partially white because I am experimenting with plastic putty to fill in the gaps between layer lines before sanding the rest away. The small Mekon was printed with thicker layers that are therefore well visible. I will work on getting a consitant good quality. 

 

This image was done wholly within Blender, showing it can do that. Right; does anyone need a Mekon model?   
 

Away until back...

After almost four years of writing posts for this blog it is time for a sabbatical. There are certainly enough subjects left to write about. For instance, there is the issue whether established echolocation can prevent eye evolution taking off (I think not), as well as more on eyes, issues on flight, on camouflage, etc. I find writing posts and interacting with those who react (thank you all!) most enjoyable. It is just there are things I need to take care of, and the blogging batteries need recharging. I do not know when I will resume writing, but a nice time to do so would be sometime around the blog's fourth birthday (that's in April, in case you wonder). That is not a definite promise though.

This does not mean that the Furaha project is in any danger. After 30 years I am not going to drop it now. Far from it, in fact: I intend to devote part of the time I have spent blogging on painting. There's lots of things to do.

As proof that the project is very much alive, I can tell you that Furaha will appear in a film that you can actually see in a cinema. The film is being produced by an independent company and is being shot right now. I cannot say too much about it, but it is not a documentary; it will be about people, right here on Earth, and the Furaha project plays a very interesting role.

The producer recently asked me to make -with two days notice, but such things always seem to work that way- a 3D model of my woolly-haired shuffler, an animal that they had seen in my newspaper interview (here and here). and so I loaded Sculptris, a program I wrote about earlier, and started making one. Sculptris is completely free and a joy to work with. The resulting model is certainly not perfect, but for someone like me with limited experience with digital 3D sculpting programs it did not turn out too bad, I think. Particularly if you consider that this was done in about four hours of time...

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here are some screen shots of Sculptris with the model in various colours. It was a bit difficult to get the lateral jaws in there, as Sculptris does not formally accept holes. What i did was to push two extrusions together and then I flattened them where they toch one another. Formally, there are no holes in the model...

Once I had that, it wasn't difficult to export the model to the 'obj' format, import it into Vue Infinite and make a 'turn table animation'. That is what you see above. Not too bad, is it?

With the 'obj' model at hand, I decided to have a better look at a website I had visited before. The site, by the firm 'Shapeways', provides a service through which you upload a 3D computer model, and they then check it, print it in 3D and ship it to you. The instructions on how to check the model and upload it were fairly straightforward, so all was left was to choose a material. You can choose various materials with different qualities, such as the ability to hold detail. I chose a material that promised to allow details and settled for a small size, as you pay for the volume of the material used.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

The model arrived within in two weeks and looked good. Part of the left maxilla had broken off, not too surprising if you consider how thin it was. The website has lots of information on how to prevent making your models too thin. What I had not foreseen is that the material was transparent, so much of the detail did not show up. I painted it to solve that, and photographed the result. Interesting, isn't it? I was impressed with the details, but would like a larger size next time. You pay for the volume of material that goes into the model, so I will have to learn how to hollow out the model; if I manage that, I should be able to order a much bigger one for the same price.

So, it's off towards the sunset for me, for a while. I intend to keep on replying to questions here and on the Furaha bulletin board in the meantime, so I'm not away altogether.