Here I am on the final day of January, watching the Florida primary results and thinking about getting in a first blog posting in for 2012. I’ve started playing around with an interesting app from AutoDesk on my iPad called 123D, kind of a stripped down version of Mudbox, their digital sculpting tool.
Like Mudbox, it comes with a library of models, both figures and objects, as well as simple geometric primitives, like most 3D programs. From there the sculpting tools are easy to use, but somewhat limited. You don’t have vectors or planes that you can grab and adjust, you just use your finger to model and a malleable, clay-like substance to build up or cut into. There is also a basic brush to paint the sculpture and a stencil tool that I haven’t been able to really figure out yet.
I started with a basic head, with the idea that I could create something I could use as my new profile picture on Facebook, which I haven’t changed in quite a while.
Here are the three stages. First the basic head template, then what I exported to PhotoShop as a .PNG (you can e-mail .PNG images or rotating table top animations as Quicktime .MOV files or post to Facebook, Flickr or YouTube) and finally the finished image. That’s me, swimming with the dolphins in Miami.
O. K., not much of a resemblance, so to test my portraiture abilities in the program I also took a shot at one of the Republican candidates (not literally of course, but not a bad idea. I'm always surprised that no one accidentally shoots Santorum when he goes moose hunting, he looks so much like Bullwinkle). Newt Gingrich always reminds me of a great description Ernest Borgnine uses in the great Sam Peckinpaw movie The Wild Bunch…”That guy’s nothin' but a two-bit redneck peckerwood”.
