This blog is documenting the sculpting of my marble immortal.
I don't want to post a blog every other day. I'd rather have an ongoing documentation and get the comments in one place, so I'm going to edit this blog and post new pics whenever I have something to report.
Apparently my old thread is too old and fails to even report when I update-bump it. Maybe it's too long, or no one else but me replied to it for too long (sniff). So anyway, here goes a new thread that will chronicle the evolution from somewhat detailed sculpt through final detailing and (possibly) polishing.
The original thread with the first 60 odd hours of sculpting (raw block up to current state, which is midway through detailed sculpting) can be found here.
This new thread will follow the original format: newest pics are always added at the top, so if you want to follow the original timeline, start at the bottom.
13-12-19, 87h total (or something) I've got a week off currently and spent yesterday and today mostly in my parents' basement workshop.
I did the lower parts of all legs, took away the last scaffolding bits and pieces, finalized the head and did the last cleanup. And with that, I call the sculpting phase FINISHED.
All that remains to do is drill a hole in the base to mount the sculpture on a nice socket. And the polishing, of course. Oh, and doing the shield as an add-on.
Some bonus shots and close-ups:
13-11-28, 77h total (not counting map editor trickery and "research") Got some two hours in last weekend, basically finished the upper thigh part of the last leg. I'll have to do another full round on the legs (lower joints and shins), take care of the socket (remove it and drill in a metal support or leave and beautify it somewhat), finalize the head and then I'm going to call the sculpting baaaaasically finished. I could of course spend an arbitrary additional time on detailing the torso, but I'm trying to refrain from that. Maybe I'll go for a little "etch-job" and engrave some of the protoss-typical circuitry in some places.
Still being grounded by the cold I acquired last weekend (on the upside: watching Dreamhack live, gogo TLO!), I did some research on how the shield might end up looking. I like the circuitry visible in the screenshot from the map editor, totally want to incorporate that.
Oh yeah, speaking of the shield: my stone-splitting tools arrived.
I do not have any idea how to translate their name, but I found a YouTube video showing how they're used. Not me in the video, and my stone is ever so slightly smaller.
I'll use the tools to separate off a somewhat half-spherical piece of stone from the blue translucent alabaster stone I have had lying around since well before I started the Ultralisk (that postal delivery guy back then must have had a fun day... 4 deceptively small packages full of STONES, weighing 20-30 kg each, to be delivered to the fourth floor... which he didn't, he left them at a shop on the ground floor level... which is a good thing, since I needed them in the basement).
The half-sphere is going to be hollowed out, probably using an angle grinder. Going to be a major PITA dust-wise. At the moment, I'm aiming for a mostly flowing flat, maybe slightly angular shield surface with some more articulated hex structures with visible etching where a shot just hit the shield.
13-11-17, 75h total Another two sessions, another (almost) two legs somewhat cleaned up, only one in its raw state now. When I'm done with that, I'll do another round of the lower half, finishing the lower leg joints and cleaning up the remains that I'm leaving for now, because I think they have some stabilizing properties.
I'm starting to feel my goal of finishing this year is somewhat ambitious. Ah well, got an additional ten days off before christmas, should be able to cram quite a bit there if need be.
Bonus: leg shot
Some more bonus pics: Roughly cleaned up the stone I'll use a piece of to make the shield. The outer shell is/was fairly dirty, the stone having been in the ground after all. I'll probably pry off a somewhat half-spherical piece you can't properly see in this shot and refine it into a shield.
13-11-08, 70h total Bi-weekly update, forgot my camera last time. On the bright side, you get to see some substantial progress this time around. I improved the head position and "beard" and further smoothed down the top half, now started on detailing the lower half. I took out the supports from beneath the legs (last part of "rough" work) and started finalizing the joint size and proportions (lots of measuring involved). I'm quite content because I managed to shorten the too-long leg somewhat without making it look wrong. Next time(s) I'll work on getting the other three legs to match the hind left one I did today.
Wow, that's pretty damn cool! I have no knowledge of sculpting whatsoever so I'm curious... How're you gonna etch in the details eventually when you get there?
On November 09 2013 21:57 Nopeudon wrote: Wow, that's pretty damn cool! I have no knowledge of sculpting whatsoever so I'm curious... How're you gonna etch in the details eventually when you get there?
I probably won't be. The "rough details" I can probably do with my Dremel tool, but I decided to take a very minimalist approach towards details: clean, flat surfaces over intricate stuff.
That looks soooo good. Btw, if you will only be editing your blog, how will you keep your blog relevant to the sidebar?
I bump the thread, but that won't keep it in the sidebar. Even if I spend several hours on the immortal per session, the changes are so incremental (to everyone but me, I guess) that I don't want to spam the front page sidebar. Also, these long blog entries serve as a reminder for myself how far I've come whenever I'm feeling I did not make any progress, and they allow me to collect most responses in one place.
By the way, I'm a total attention whore when it comes to replies. Even a simple "nice" or something helps to keep me motivated (and sometimes, it's kind of demotivating spending four hours in a dusty basement room and hardly making visible progress, hint hint).
On November 10 2013 00:56 DanielHetberg wrote: By the way, I'm a total attention whore when it comes to replies. Even a simple "nice" or something helps to keep me motivated (and sometimes, it's kind of demotivating spending four hours in a dusty basement room and hardly making visible progress, hint hint).
Very nice work so far. The mid-stride pose is a neat touch, though it probably made symmetry a little trickier. :D
On November 10 2013 10:10 SnowfaLL wrote: that looks difficult; one slip of your hand or lapse of thought and you can ruin 70 hours of work!
Yeah, both have happened to me, but lapse of thought produces more significant problems. Slip of hand can be minimized by knowing your tools and being careful but you still need to maintain a constant vigilance in that, as evidenced by me stupidly breaking off one of the gun arms before. If you make a mental mistake you can work on something for a full session without realizing that you just ruined something by carefully and confidently working on a proportion that you got wrong in your head, or measured or wrote down wrong.
Still, part of sculpting in stone or wood is living with your mistakes and making the best of the options you have left after making them. This is also important because you sometimes find fault lines in the stone or inclusions of other material that really are not your fault, and you need to integrate those into the sculpture as best as you can, too, so same situation really.
You can see it a bit, it's in fact quite dependent on the lighting. If you light it normally, it might just as well be a vein in the stone, but with the finer details I'm doing now I start noticing the special surface luminosity of marble. Since the stone is slightly translucent, you get a very soft kind of glow, espcially with backlighting. That, unfortunately, is where you totally see the glue, since it's just flat opaque. I'm curious how it will turn out for the parts I intend on polishing (guns, maybe more).
Bonus: I don't have a polished marble sample at hand, but this is the somewhat translucent blue alabaster I was thinking on using for the immortal's shield. Compare the rather opaque look when it's flat on the table vs. the awesome translucency against my desk lamp. Sorry for the pics, in reality it looks way better.
Concerning stability, the thinnest piece of the blue stone is 9 mm thick (that's 0.35" for you non-metric, non-gun-owner guys), and I couldn't break it in my hands. I tried. A hammer would work, but let's say it can easily carry its own weight in this configuration.
Using my incredible knowledge of fundamental physics (I was fairly sure, but I looked it up on Wikipedia just to be safe), the attenuation of electromagnetic radiation passing through a medium (light through stone) goes exponentially. This means that if you double the thickness of the material, only the square of the previous fraction of light passes through. If 1" lets 50% through, 2" will leave 25% (because the second inch absorbs 50% of what was left before, just as the first inch). If 1" lets 10% through, 2" will leave 1%, and so on. By the way, this is why you pour huge amounts of concrete and lead over radioactive desaster sites.
Aaaanyway, since the attentuation is fairly extreme in the 9 mm thickness case, I'm fairly sure that if I halve the thickness to 4-5 mm the translucency will be MUCH better (e.g. sqrt(1%) = 10% --> ten times as much light, but then again, our eyes perceive light intensity roughly logarithmically...), and concerning mechanical stability it should still hold its weight if I do a mostly vertical section of shield. Alabaster windows in Yemen seem to have been cut to a similar thickness, historically (link).
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