Making of Eternal Flameby Enrique Parietti
Every piece of work is a new step in a long, never-ending staircase... Everything I learnt in "Eternal Flame" I wish to fully apply on future works that I'm thinking of making.
Thank you for your attention. This image was
made in Softimage|XSI 5.11
Modeling
In the Modeling side of things, only built-in XSI modeling tools were used for all the elements in the scene. It was not necessary to resort to using sculpting techniques and it was the traditional polygonal modeling method that was put to use.
The main element in the scene is the female sculpture, so that was the first thing to be modeled.
The first step was to use a very simple rig over a female figure I had previously modeled. I didn't spend too long with the weighting, since I only required a basic pose from which to work from. Careful weighting of the mesh was unnecessary as it's not for animation. This is why you can see slightly abnormal articulation bends in Pic. 01.
Once I had the pose down,
I froze the envelope and
delete the rig that was no
longer needed.
The modeling work again
only used basic XSI modeling
tools, extruding, adding and
removing faces, loops and
such, where needed
always observing a copy of
the original mesh to try to
avoid losing the reference of
the movement captured in
the pose.
To have a guide of how I had to work on the cloth I previously created a number of drawings over a screenshot of the model, whilst studying various reference pictures of classical sculptures, mostly Greek and Roman.
The hardest part to work on was to get the cloth to not hide the shape of the body but not get completely stuck to its surface. I tried to get the folds to look as natural as possible. (Pic. 02)
The second point to highlight in the modeling aspect was the creation of the Ivy. (Pic. 03)
The original idea was to use the freeware software "Ivy Generator". However, in this occasion I needed the Ivy to grow specifically over where I wanted to avoid a sensation of chaos. So in the end, I decided to create the Ivy artisan-style, using classic techniques (a common feature in this particular piece..) I started by creating some curves over the walls and the column and these would be the guides to extruding polygons later.
Then I used the same "guide" curves to multiply the polygons that made the leaves throughout the branches. Some manual positioning was needed to avoid leaf interpenetration and too "orderly" a look. (Pic.04)
This process never had a specific time frame, as over the following days, I would continue to add and remove leaves where I felt it was necessary.
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