Model of figures on Cistine Chapel ceiling?
Yofiel
Posts: 204
I did a test with Carrara 8.1 on creating a scene of Botticelli's painting 'Birth of Venus.' and the results were pretty good. So I'm starting on Michelangelo next week. Anyone interested in working together on it?
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I've been keeping a diary of ongoing work on Facebook here:
http://www.facebook.com/ernest.meyer3
Here's the wireframe for Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus,' I'm pleasantly surprised to find the physics engine appears to be parallelized. Just making the cloth which the lady is running across to the sea to put on Venus as soon as she arrives on shore, and adding directional forces so Zephyrus can blow her hair. It has three instances of V4 with Emma skin texture, the morphing dress, Evangelique hair, Ceslistia hair, Michael4, and a terrain for the ocean and land with realistic sky. I started with a Poser file, but there were problems with morphs importing properly, so I rebuilt it entirely inside Carrara.
Not quite sure what you mean by this.
I put a picture of the processor usage on my blog with more information.
After the physics is done, I'll be working on cherubs, which is also described on my blog:)
My bad! I read it as paralyzed. I wondered why you'd be happy it was paralyzed! D'oh! :red:
Glad to help. Meanwhile I'm just adding cloths to 'Birth of Venus.' I tried following the youtube videos, which are now deleted, and had little success. Then I found the "Carrara 8 First Steps" PDF this week. It took about 15 minutes to figure it out and make a simulation. Now I'm struggling with the water texture in the terrain builder.
ROFL!
Sorry ep! The caffeine is just hitting my bloodstream...I got a good chuckle (especially thinking back to my multi-threaded programming days).
@emeyer: I love the idea of using Carrara to recreate art like this. I doubt my skills are up to snuff to assist but I eagerly await seeing the results.
Are you building everything yourself? Because I can heartily recommend PhilW's Realistic Seas -- made specifically for Carrara -- as a way to quickly have a variety of water surfaces. See the "A New Hope" thread for a scene I did with the Medusa ship and Realistic Seas.
Thank you for the suggestion.
I guess my question is, what level of realism are you going for? Are you trying to recreate the paintings completely, right down to the perspective, or are you trying to recreate the paintings' poses and figures in a realistic environment, as if they're models in studio?
That's a good question. Michelangelo sort of had a mixture of post-impressionist and phoptorealistic aspects in his creations. At the time they hadn't really distinguished them.
Also I should mention, the title of this post would be 'sistine' not 'cistine' if you're interested in correctness rather than finding something from seaqrch results quickly. And it's wrong of me to assume people are familiar with more than Adam from the sistine chapel. Here's the Last Judgment, which could be the most interesting to build with Genesis/Victoria/Michael in about a dozen separate parts.
And here's a detail of one angel group at the top, with light from the left. Most people won't know the cloths covering private parts weren't painted by Michelangelo. They were added posthumously by the infamous 'fig leaf painters' who were a topic of much debate in the art community of the era.
...and here's a detail of the damned. First thing I plan to do is get figures assembled in the right poses, which after getting hardware capable of doing it, is really the easy part.
I had to think about the question of style quite a bit more, probably I have some more to think on it, but I believe the answer should be that the created art should capture the spirit of the original. Consider for example some of the best performances of Macbeth in the last 50 years have been in WWII settings. Same's true of Oedipus Tyranos.
So I am thinking my first cut at the angels in Michelangelo's Last Judgment will include female figures.
Now maybe that's controversial, after all same-sex marriage is still controversial for the Catholics, but as these days a woman could become pope, well...things have changed since the original painting. Michelangelo's main objective was to inspire, after all )
It's going to be another day putting 'Birth of Venus' to bed, then I'll be starting on it :)
As a footnote, in response to the other question, Botticelli did something very interesting with the waves in 'Birth of Venus.' There isn't a renderer to my knowledge which could do the same thing, and I think the fellow's work you mention is very good, but it doesn;t actually help in this situaiton. I thought maybe of doing the crescents with some kind of texture map, but the ocean waves kind of merge into the clouds in the sky, and I really don't really have the talent to do that properly yet. .
You'll probably have to do some of your project in an image editor. Preferably one that can handle layers and masks.
That would, in part, defeat the objective of making models and scenes of renaissance art available for 3D animation. I do think it is possible with a custom texture, so one could glide into Aphrodite's heaven with ease, but not with current stock oceans and atmosphers. IThat part is just going to take a while :)
Post work is also viable for animations.
If you want to make the entire scene available for others to open in Carrara or another 3D app, you'll need to use your own figures.
Thank you so much for the advice. Are you interested in creating some renaissance scenes yourself?
And I'm thinking maybe I'm asking in the worng place. Some people already have active products asking for people to participate, and I don't want to compete with them. Also it appears this forum mostly focuses on rendering and modeling issues, rather than discussing the nature of the content itself. And working on Renaissance art, I'm also concerned I could violate Daz's noble and admirable rules on nudity. I'm having problems myself with the hudity in Renaissance art. But then as Michelangelo said, God designed the human body, and it's perfect:)
I'm not really that interested in recreating the work of the old masters myself, but there may be others here that are. It sounds like an interesting idea, so I wish you the best of luck.
There is a drive to show what Carrara can do via a short film, but this forum is not dedicated to that or just modeling issues. Many times people come here to ask advice on lighting, effects, basic troubleshooting etc. Don't hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Most people here are willing to offer advice, tutorials or work-arounds in many different areas.
You may be interested in this 3D view of the Sistine Chapel by the Vatican. You can zoom in and out and rotate around the room.
http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html
Nifty, isn't it? I wish there was an exisitng 3DS or similar file of the chapel interior, I was somewhat surprised to find public-domain ones of the pantheon, but not of the vatican interior. Maybe they don't want 3D reproductions for the same reason as Egypt flooded temples when it built dams instead of accepting USA's offer to dig them up and move them here: they wanted more tourism. Egypt did let the Metropolitan musem in NYC have one temple the end, but they deliberately gave the USA one of the lesser temples. Anyway, the 3D view is pretty cool, but I'm interested in reconstructions of the painting scenes from the renaissance, rather than the buildings themselves. I was surprised not to find anyone who'd done it before, and although it's alot of work, it really is something I'd think artists will enjoy for many years.
I was there a long time ago in the 1970s for a tour. Unfortunately for me the Sistine chapel was under repair or at least some of the paintings were so didn't get to see it in person.
I haven't had any takers on the sistine chapel, and it's took giant a project for me by myself, so I'm just picking through some other fine art with less figures. Always glad to hear from people wanting to work together )
The animation/images you're trying to render in 3D are painted in 2D and the skill is how they are made to look three dimensional, upside down on a curved ceiling. I think that look is going to be very difficult to achieve in Carrara without photoshopping the images. Also Michelangelo took liberties with the human form to emphasise certain features in connection with the golden ratio/proportion. And apparently he didn't want to do the job because he thought of himself as a sculptor working in 3D and not a painter but was given an offer he couldn't refuse by the Pope (of the Medici family - gulp!) But it's great that you're experimenting with this because we can all learn from your experience.
Well, Michelangelo wouldn't call them 'liberties'. What you say though has truth. I decided to start with the Versailles ceiling of Apollo, and replicated clouds on a hemisphere. Then I put the free 3D-age charior with the free Millenium LE horses and Michael in it wearing a toga and some V3 hair as there isn't a good M3 curly hair I can find. It looks cheap. However, I can draw a really nifty Venus and Hephaestus...I understand about the perspective, having lived in NYC for a while, the artist who painted the ceilings in the main building of the Rockefeller center was very talented at tromp de l-oeil and I studied it quite a bit, espectally the main figures which appear to stand on different pillars depending where one is in the room. What I thought would be fun is to make an animation that does the effect in 3D, I'm still thinkking about hos to do it...