Rodin Hands, part 2

I went down to the Gates of Hell today.  However, the weather was actually fairly pleasant.

I was able to take some helpful photos of the hands in their natural museum environment.  I also learned a valuable lesson - always check your equipment before shooting.  I was shooting in JPG mode, not Camera Raw, unfortunately.  It actually is not a huge deal, as these are just reference images.... but it still bothers me.  Live and learn, I suppose.

So, these are the best quality, but I sure had fun taking them.  I will probably wander back through the Cantor Arts Museum- it's both free and awesome.  Not a combo you see very often!

In the mean time, a smattering of some of the many, many images I took today.

Rodin, 1885-1886: Left Hand of Pierre and Jacques de Wiessant

Rodin, 1888: Large Clenched Left Hand

Rodin, 1903: Large Left Hand - detail

Rodin: Small Clenched Right Hand - detail

Rodin: (behind) Small Clenched Right Hand, (foreground) Clenched Left Hand, 1900

Rodin, 1880-1884: Blessing Left Hand

Rodin, 1886: Left Hand of Eustache de St. Pierre - detail

Rodin: (foreground) Blessing Left Hand, 1880-1884, (behind) Large Left Hand, 1903

Rodin Hands

So, The Cantor Arts Center, one of the museums at Stanford, has a wonderfully fantastic collection of Rodin sculptures, including:

"The Thinker"

"The Gates of Hell"

and "The Burghers of Calais." 

 Admission into the museum is free, happily enough.


We, however, are going to be working with the Rodin Hands.

Not as well known, but supremely interesting.  One of the professors here at Stanford even uses the hands as a way of teaching, as 5 out of the 8 hands display a pathological condition.

A sneak peak into (one of the things) we are doing here at Stanford- Rodin in 3D. I have been working on fitting a model from a segmented data set containing broken metacarpals.  Fairly severely broken metacarpals, even.  However, I am jumping ahead of myself.

The Stanford Clinical Anatomy department has been working on getting the hands laser scanned and converted into 3D models.  This is where I come in.

While I can't really show images of the project in progress, rest assured that it's a lot a fun.  Leslie White and I are working on the hands together.  We're having to fill in the 3D models where the laser scanning technology didn't pick up the surface.  Holes, sometimes giant holes, were left in the models.  These need to be filled in carefully, keeping as true to the original surface as possible.  I will be heading over to the Cantor Arts Center tomorrow to take more reference photos for this process.

Afterwards, we will be superimposing pathological anatomy, the same types of conditions the hands express, into the scans.  I just finished putting the shattered metacarpal scan into one of the hands this afternoon.

We have a crack team of interns that have been working on segmenting out the metacarpal data from a CT scan.  With a little bit of clean up in Amira from yours truly, it was ready to be exported as individual bones, rigged in Maya,

and repositioned into the Rodin hand scan.  An interesting process, to be sure.  Next, our crack team will be working on retopo'ing the hands themselves so they can be used in a real-time environment.  It's going to be awesome.  They are going to be learning 3D Coat to do the retopo'ing process.

In any case, I can't wait to see where this project is headed.  It looks to be a great start, and I can't say how excited I have been to be involved!

Eye studies

Today was a busy day at work.  Lots of questions to answer and fractured bones to segment.  So, I decided to do just a few quick 5-10 minute sketches of eyes to relax when I got home.  The two panels I am doing for AMI are on my mind, and tomorrow is a holiday.  So, hopefully, I'll be able to get some great work done.

Sketches!

How I remember eyes, with no additional study of life or mirrors, etc. Hmm...  In many ways, this reminds me of manga eyes. 

Time for a real reference!  With very thin eyebrows...  Eyebrows are dumb.

Woah.  Perspective.  I dislike side views, so I'm trying to sketch them more

Lush lashes.

Paper Mache Eye - Take 2, part 2

 So, the next steps of this paper mache eye are complete.  I'm finally at the 'painting the backing' stage.  But, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Here is the photo documentation of these stages of the paper mache eye.

So, I last left off with many, many stages of white tissue paper sclera over the retina.  However, those layers were covering up the initial vessels made of thread.  So, I added another layer of those onto the sclera alone.  I tried to match the side profiles together as well. 









Here you can see how opaque the tissue paper looks while it has the glue mixture on it.  Because the paste I am using has a high component of Elmer's Glue in it, it adds to the whiteness of the look while it is wet.  It dries clear though.

Hence the vessels looking very prominent once that layer is dry.  I decided to add one more layer on top of this one, as the vessels are just a tad too red for me.

So, the eye in natural light.  I think that I am done with the paper mache part at this point.  The tissue paper sclera is at a very nice thickness, and the iris smallish, but okay.  Time to remove the armature.  Because the eye needs to have the light inside of it and sit on a different backing, it also needs to be able to stand on it's own, without the balloon inside.  Here's hoping the lotion is enough to keep the paper mache and the armature from actually sticking together.

Yay!  I sliced through the edges of the paper mache all along the base about a quarter of an inch in.  And then I cut small vents up to the corners, so the base could be removed, but the paper mache could be glued back onto a new base.  I then cut a small hole hole on the cardboard to better be able to maneuver the base out.  It took a little bit of doing, but I was able to carefully separate the armature from paper mache.

The armature itself deflated when I started to cut into the base.  But, using just the space heater method, it didn't actually deflate the balloon until the very end.

I cut a small pupil into the iris.  This is the thickness of the paper mache at the iris. 

Aaand, a paper mache eye!  One with a retina, non-visual retina, sclera, vessels, iris, and pupil.  I haven't worked out how to do a cornea yet, but that's next on the list.

This is what the paper mache eye looks like with the light inside of it.  I'm pretty excited, all told.  It's really starting to come together.  And the many layers of tissue paper for the sclera are much better than the single thick layer of white that doesn't show as much light through it.  I even like how the non-visual retina doesn't have as much light showing through.  All in all, it's starting to wrap up.







Unfortunately, or fortunately if you think of it in another way, I may have to do this eye over a third time.  As you can see in the last pictures, the eye itself bulges out over the sides of the 4" tile backing. It's not really supposed to do that.  Whoops?  So I may go ahead and make a third eye, made to the absolute correct dimensions.  And it would give me a chance to change the size of the iris as well.  That is one part that I think I would redo if I had the chance.  And who says I don't?  So, once more into the breach.  Nope, with a lack of time, I'm going with this one.  Life catches up with you.  I hope it all works out!