A very good exercise in traditional sculpture is to set a timer and sculpt something as quickly as possible. It keeps you form getting bogged down in the details. As I begin to work in mudbox I gave myself that same exercise. Of course I always like working from funny photographs and I love people, so here is one I found to work from. It felt good to put “gram” aside and work on something fast. I may do a couple more of this one and then it is on to a little child or baby funny face. the first one was done in 28 minutes( I had to go to church) the others 30 minutes.

I thought I would share this with you. As usual maybe you can follow along. This is mudbox. I am working on my first portrait. Here is mom. Yes, the wonderful woman that is found on our podcast, and is known as “gram”. Anyway, it is a long drawn out process of sculpting in Mudbox but she is coming along.

This is what all my fuss has been about in the last few weeks, needing more RAM, new graphics card. And now to find the one thing that was bugging me may actually be a bug in OS 10.5.7. But, today I can use mudbox again, and I am thrilled to be able to do so.

I”m so glad that things are being solved. My graphics card should come fed ex today. I waited most of the day and missed it at 9:05 p.m. yesterday. How that happen when we work and live in the same place? What up with that fed ex? For those who don’t know. I’m trying to write a book about Mudbox. However my graphics card does not work with the new version of Mudbox for the mac. Making it extremely difficult to make my deadlines with the publisher.

I think I am resolving my retopologizing problems. For those of you who don’t know what that means it simply is this. When working in mudbox there is a mesh, that is under the clay that you see when you are sculpting. The mesh has to have an appropriate form. If you think of a window screen the mesh that underlies your piece should have quads and not triangles and be all of similar size. So in other words. If I want to scan a mock up lose clay piece. I will Use the Next Engine Scanner, which I am also reviewing and hope to show how to use in a variety of ways. This is a 3d scanner that can scan my artwork and make it into a digital image that I can then either send for output as shown in the latter part of this you tube video that I created or bring into mudbox. However. The mesh that will come out of this is too tight and may have triangles. I will need to change that mesh so that it can be sculpted upon. This is called retopologizing. My problem is that I have not been able to find a retopologizing tool that is a stand alone tool. I hate for artists to have to go and buy and learn an entire 3d program just to be able to retopologize. So I think I have this finally figured out. I’ll let you know. So I have graphics card, and retopologizing tool, more RAM and I’ll soon be ready to go. It is a good thing because many chapters are due to the publisher at the end of June, and until this point I have not been able to work on the program. Oh sure, I can open it and play around, but then it might flip upside down or backwards, when I am turning the sculpture and studying it, or worse yet. It disappears. All results of a graphics card problem. Never have I sculpted in the traditional studio when a sculpture has disappeared. It feels good to get things together to proceed.