For the third part of the project, modifying a scan, I decided to continue work on the John Goucher bust that Professor Le scanned in the Athenaeum. Well, continuing work is not the right word, as I had to copy the original file that Professor Le sent us and work from scratch. For some reason, the model that I had previously worked on would not let me modify it anymore.
So, I did what we did when first experimenting with Blender, we cleared everything behind the bust and cleaned up the base. The next step was to try to work out the lump on the back of John Goucher’s neck. The way I went about this was through sculpting, using the elastic deform tool. My method to sort of get rid of this lump was to pinch at it from a back portrait perspective, as can be seen below. Then, I went to a profile view to smooth it out by bringing the ridge close to the neck. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something.
Since this was something done in class, I had to continue to modify it to submit it. My initial idea was to give John Goucher a body out of the bust. Arms and everything. Well, at least a torso.
I used the inflate tool and clay to add on shoulders and a chest to John Goucher, but the sculpture kept breaking. After a while, I gave up on trying to give him shoulders, arms, and a chest; so, I decided to look for another, possibly simpler modification to this statue.
Looking at the bust, I figured out that John Goucher somewhat resembled Santa Claus, so, I went about giving him a hat. Once again, I used elastic deform to stretch out his head or hair, whatever you think I stretched out, like some sort of alien. After his head sort of resembled a Santa hat, I inflated the end to make a pom-pom at the end of the hat. I also used the scrape tool to demarcate the edge of the hat and his head. And another scraped line to shows where the white puffy band of the hat ended, and moved on to the red felt part. But it still did not look like a jolly old Santa, so, I inflated his beard.
I thought I was done, until I was told to make it water tight, and so the pain began. After ignoring all the breaks in the sculpture, I went back to the mesh model to find out all the fractures and fix them.
There were many triangle planes intersecting and I needed to track down the vertex points that caused these problems. I tried to find a way to simplify the process instead of doing it point by point. Almost all Google searches all pointed towards the use of other programs what would do that automatically, or at least it seemed that way. A lot of these vertex points were inside the statue and around the base of it. So, I reduced the model to just the head and part of the chest, with no base supporting it. I never intend to print this out since it is still not watertight.