It’s been two weeks and a bit since I started this foot and thankfully I’m nearly finished with it!
Things have been learned, frustrations have arose but generally, fun times have been had. I think the hardest thing to overcome is trying to see past the details and anatomy and just figure out the planes that make up the foot. Trying to see the subtle changes in value, how shapes interact with each other and how shadows are cast on to the foot and work board, and the list goes on.
It’s a lot of work and a lot of things to keep in mind, but it should come as second nature as time progresses; at least, I hope it does!

Still got to fix the weight distribution on the toes and the shape of the big toe’s abductor muscle, and then it’s done.
I asked the teacher what on earth we do with these sculpts when they’re finished. It seems we have three choices…
1. Hollow it out, bake it and it take it home
2. Mold and cast it in plaster
3. Take a picture and dump the entire thing back in the barrel of clay…

I’m a bit wary about doing the latter, especially if you spent almost 20 hours on it in total. So baking it is!

Either way, have a foot.

Ok, I have been telling myself the past two years I should really take up traditional sculpting so I can improve my digital sculpting work. So I finally took the plunge and registered myself for an entire year of classes, 10 hours a week! Every monday, tuesday and wednesday evening, yours truly will be dabbling in clay trying to not make a complete fool out of himself!

For our first “lesson”, I had the choice to recreate either a hand, foot or the front of a face. I felt rather good about myself today, so I said “what the heck, give me a foot!”. This is where I should note that sculpting feet is one of the hardest things to do right. They’re in the same difficulty zone as heads and hands in my oh so humble opinion.
Now, I was however expecting some sort of basic guidance as to how to start something like this (did I mention it was life size?) in pure clay. The guy told me not to use any kind of framing structure, just slabs of clay.
The only guide I got was that should take a big blob of clay, smash it with a hammer to flatten it, take the original foot cast, mark out the pedestal and work from there on out. In the end I just screwed around for 3 hours without much feedback. But the feedback I did get was pretty damn priceless!

The key here is to find one point of reference/measurement  - let’s say the length of the heel of the foot  - and use that measurement/point as a guideline for everything else. Once you’ve decided on your point of reference, you should never use anything else anymore. Pretty solid stuff imho.

Either way, picture time! Can you feel the Rodin inside of me? *ahem*

click me!

Hi guys ‘n gals!

I’ve just recently built a fairly adequite re-useable basemesh for female characters. And I decided to share her for you to use!

She’s been optimized for digital sculpting and as such, she’s made up out of evenly spaced quads. There are a few triangles in the mesh, but these are located between the individual fingers and on the bottom of the feet. So they shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.

She’s about 1.72 meters in height in relation to Modo’s coordinate system. It is possible that when you import this mesh in other DCC applications such as XSI, Max, Maya, etc… that it will not read 1.71 meters so you’ll need to manually scale her up or down accordingly.
Tongue and eyes are included, but teeth are not. You can find a good set of teeth on gnomonlogy.com by Alex Alveraz .

Feel free to use this mesh for any kind of project or sculpting exercise you see fit.