New website

I now have three websites dealing with art projects:

1. This blog, which explores how artists (including me) attempt to depict motion. I’ll post my latest works here, news, and research.
2. TimPickup.com – a new fixed website with formal information about my art (Biog,CV etc…) and images from art shows I’ve done.
3. GeneticMoo.com – which describes a group project that I do with Nicola Schauerman, where we create digital hybrid monsters.

I was recently honoured to present The artist falling off a plinth at the launch event for the CCW Grad School. The setting in the Purcell Room allowed for some dramatic photographs.

Futurism at the Tate Modern

I’ve decided to continue with this blog, on which I described my MA progress at Camberwell College of Art up to 2009. The main focus here will continue to be the artistic depiction of motion, covering my own and others work, both historical and contemporary. This blog will form one part of a personal website hosting all my projects. I’ve decided to continue blogging as I’ve built a small audience, and it serves to promote my work and enables me to contextualise my work. I’ll be re-organising the front end over the summer.

Futurism at the Tate Modern

This was a good show, but perhaps not so good for the Futurists as it over emphasised pre-war painting. Where the Futurists really shone (and fulfilled their name) was in alternative new media – manifestos, graphics, photography, theatre, poetry, performance, and sound art. They applied their dynamic philosophy to all aspects of their life releasing bizarre manifestos on food, clothes and artistic revolution. In this show, painting wise, the Futurists are outshone by other more focussed movements; the Cubists, the Rayonists, the Cubo-Futurists, and even the unfairly maligned Vorticists. However the cross pollination between all these groups gives a good impression of the artistic ferment of the early twentieth century. Many works overflow with fragments of urban life and the expressions of simulaneity and dynamism are ever present. These paintings excite in the same way the city excites.

I’m specifically interested in the attempt to capture motion (or conversely the space passed through) and I’d like to analyse the different approaches to painting motion, largely invented by the Futurists. Did they succeed?

Multiple Frames

The Futurists transferred chronophotographic techniques to painting – displaying several frames from a particular motion in the same pictoral space. This can clearly be seen in Gonchorova’s The Cyclist (1913). This can be easily read as an attempt at portraying movement – but can be criticised (and was) because the eye never actually sees this kind of multiple image. It is more like a crude diagram of movement. There’s a naivety about this method, multiple feet look humourous, and it is the kind of effect used a lot in comics.

Force lines

The more advanced version of the above blurs all the frames into a single swirl of motion. The multiples become abstracted into geometric patterns trailing the leading pose. Taken to graphical extremes this can make for some striking paintings, for example Russolo’s The Revolt (1911). The Futurists hoped these paintings would galvanise the audience into action, literally sweeping the viewer into revolutionary acts or at least into seeing the world in a new way. These sort of geometric paintings are often sited as good examples of expressing movement. The eye is supposed to vigourously flow around the painting – I wonder – the eye may move around the canvas, but is always contained by the frame, and the gallery, and the next picture along and so on. Movement is curtailed by the schematics of the design. Occasionally this can work, for example Nevinson’s Bursting Shell (1915) which he painted while on Ambulance duty in Britain in WW1. Here the motion is supplied as a kind of optical illusion.

Pattern

Other Futurists used pattern to break apart an image and force the eye all over the canvas to express the vibrancy and motion of an event. Again the eye is moving and not the subject of the painting. There’s a puzzle like quality to the work Severini’s The Dance of the Pan-Pan at the “Monico” painting (1911). The eye flits from shape to shape.

Boccioni’s States of Mind

By limiting the formal experimentation to a square frame, perhaps potential ‘kinetic’ energy has been dissipated. This is one reason why Boccioni’s Double Triptych States of Mind seemed to me the most exciting work on display (apart from his other undoubted masterpiece Unique Forms of Continuity in Space which seemed oddly isolated in this show – his death aged 33 in WW1 was a huge loss for Modernism). By looking at a single event from three different perspectives – a train leaves Milan station (people exchange farewells, some go, some stay) – Boccioni opens up the space between the paintings setting up multiple contrasts. After visiting Paris Boccioni then reworked the triptych in a more Cubist inspired style which sets up another layer of comparisons across time, space and artistic stylisation. Individually several of the 6 paintings are beautiful compositions of fleeting parts of trains, buildings, trees and passengers – exactly the type of thing seen through moving windows of a train journey compressed over time. The double triptych multiplies this dynamism many times over.

These triptyches are exactly the type of starting point I need for a series of planned digital prints which take a London location as a focal point and compress a series of short video sequences into single images, by algorithmically recombining the frames (for example scratching them through each other). Working on several different perspectives should help give a structured framework to work against. Boccioni’s horizontals (leaving), verticals (staying), and swirls (farewells) may be a useful initial formalisation – I was thinking of allowing the broader movements of color blocks across the videos to determin the finer trajectories of the combinations. The resulting images are hard to explain in words, and Boccioni’s work is something like what I had in mind. As I make these works I’ll post the results and explain the programming in more depth.

End of Year Show

The end of year show was a great success with over 3000 people attending during the week. Andy Stiff, the course tutor, said the show was very professional and I think everyone had a good time. My sculptures were really well received and there was a lot of interest in all the Digital Art work on display.

Here are some photos taken during the week of my two sculptures:
The artist falling off a plinth.
The artist vaulting over a balcony.

Scaling Up

In many ways the last year of my project has been about scaling up my voxelisation method. Click on the image below to see it fullsize. You’ll have to attend the end of year show to see the final life-sized sculpture.

Digital Arts MA09

Private View :
14 July 6-9pm

Exhibition Continues:
15–17 July 10am–7pm
18–19 July 11am–4pm

The Basement
Camberwell College of Arts
Wilson Road
SE5 8LU

For more information and map go to the show website.

Vaulting 3

I’ve block painted the model with help from Nicola, and have made an important decision which is not to try and make the colouring realistic. The reason for this is that the form itself has a certain crudeness (due to inevitable misalignments and the low resolution of my process) and to add a realistic face on top of this would look strange, and pull the sculpture in a punch and judy direction. The face has been roughly modelled and I quite like the lumpen-ness of it all.

As i was painting one thing that I noticed was that the wet paint bought out the form more, as the contrast is greater, for example the right black leg below. I may do some experiments with varnish next week.

Incidentally there was a huge lump of sculpture in the same space as mine last year, of a sort of toe. Half figurative half abstract, it was one of my favourite pieces in the show. I can’t remember the name of the artist, but it was someone from TRAIN research group at Camberwell.

By keeping the painting crude and not adding realistic features to the face, I hope that the line between figuration and abstraction will be emphasised. As people walk up the stairs below the sculpture I hope that the coloured lump comes to life as a vaulting man.

In terms of balance I did a trial last week downstairs, using boxes for support and I it seemed easier than I’d anticipated. Given the hands joining the balcony is strong enough I think that all the weight will be supprted on the one leg with just a single wooden strut to stop it from tipping sideways.

For now, back to tidying the studios in preparation for build week.

Geoffrey Mann

Geoffrey Mann is a Scottish Product Artist who graduated from the RCA a few years back. He has received a lot of acclaim for his Long Exposure models which share some similarities with mine but are rendered out of porcelain, plastic and glass. Geoffrey takes a film of a motion (usually moths or birds in flight) and then traces out each frame as a silhouette. These shapes are then passed into a 3D modelling package and are joined together to form a continuous model, these are then rapid prototyped and then cast in a fine material. By reducing the motion to slices he avoids all problems with watertightness and bad meshes. I should thank Geoffrey, whose work I discovered at the beginning of the course, and whose name long exposure sculptures I also used, as it was the most simple and effective way to describe what I’m trying to do. It is interesting that like Peter Jansen, Geoffrey has chosen to place these forms mainly within a craft & design context, something my hulking cardboard models are not suited for.

Flight Takeoff

Nocturne moth, Long Exposure series, Nylon, 2009

More recently Geoffrey has started to look at human forms in motion. This one is a forward hand spring of a gymnast friend of his, rapid prototyped in polymer.

Geoffrey has recently expanded his website with lots of great images and magazine articles.

The artist vaulting over a balcony

I’m half way through my final life-size model. Here is the initial sketch idea.

The piece was inspired by walking around the college and finding a suitable dramatic location. – the central staircase. A friend suggested the idea and I liked it immediately as it worked on several levels. Including referencing a famous photograph by Yves Kline:

I used the same method and filmed video footage and modelled this in Poser.

One of the problems of the piece was how do the hands attach to the balcony? This is a major point of weight distribution so has to be modeled accurately. Unfortunately Poser doesn’t allow you to fix hands in place across a pose, so after roughly fixing them by eye I had to export the model in two parts. The body and the hands seperatly. The hands could then be tidied in Rhino to fit the balcony and then added back into the finished 3D model.

I’ve decided to make this action continuous – or as continuous as possible (consisting of 80 frames). So all the space passed through is modelled. This creates a more fluid form, paradoxically also more static. I may paint this figure realistically too, so you can see the facial features. I’m pleased with the form – it reminds me of a flamenco dancer. This type of reading is not available to analysis until the sequence is actually modelled, which makes the process somewhat perilous, but at the same time exciting.

A big advantage of the continuous decision was that the slices for the model are much simpler to cut out although the large size has made it slower – the slices are larger than the card so need to be broken into segments – still 1 month of construction looks possible.

I built a maquette to try and figure out how to break the model down. It doesn’t balance on its own so I’ll have to consider some struts or suspension to secure it.

When making the model I’m considering several factors

1) Accuracy – I’m trying to make them as accurate as I can
2) Time – I only have 1 month per model
3) Weight – I need to be able to break apart, transport and rebuild the models.
4) Materials – I’m trying to waste less cardboard.
5) Strength – The model needs to be durable

The previous half-size model was made from solid layers of card. As this model is twice as large I’ve reduced weight and material usage by hollowing out the layers – and also on the really large parts missing out every other layer (using support strips instead). I’m confident that the papier mache will smooth over these gaps.

Cardboard, Paper and Papier-Mache

I’ve been enjoying using low tech materials to make my sculptures and think the contrast to the high tech digital concepts is interesting. I’ve been looking at other artists who’ve used cardboard and papier mache as mediums and who’ve accepted the resultant crude finish. Through the 20th century cardboard hasn’t featured that prominently – the Cubists and Kurt Schwitters used it in collages, but it’s not been used so much for its own properties – the art world probably sees these mediums as too impermament or craft oriented. A few artists do use ‘crappy’ materials for their own sake; for example Joseph Beauys and Colin Self. But more recently artists (perhaps green inspired) have been developing ideas specifically geared to these mediums.

Honorary mention should go to Niki Saint Phalle whose range of cheerful styles included papier-mache originally. She soon adapted to plaster and wire frames to enable the sculptures to get bigger, but the pieces still have that rough finish. Here’s her most famous piece ‘Hon’:

If you type cardboard artist into Google you will typically find two types of art:

1) organic forms – ironically often laser cut
2) decorative pattern based art

Good examples of these approaches would be the contemproary work of Tobias Putrih (which suggest gnarled up figures) and Mark Langan’s semi-reliefs. In both cases corrugated layering, and granular possibilities are the key design considerations.

More exacting is the work of Chris Gilmour who builds as accurate as possible life-size models of cars, bicycles and other machines. The chief aesthetic response to these would be Wow! (I suppose) I’ve always appreciated art that looks as if it has taken a lot of (boring) work to put together – even if the work is shared by a team, but can’t find much more in the objects. (edit) This is perhaps unfair as I haven’t seen any of the works in the flesh. The redundancy of making anything original is a theme which I have related to in the past.

My work seems to sit somewhere between painstaking effort and a playful crude finish. A good example of an art aesthetic like this (though not made from card) would be Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures of the 60’s. These reacted against what a sculpture should be – hard, marble, imposing, classical and also reflected the disposability of 60’s culture and the game like experimental happenings of the time – which these sculptures often served as props for. Oldenburg developed them further into larger and more permament, but still cheap looking, sculptures like the apple core below

Segal’s sculptures of the same period, which although made of solid stuff also share an unfinished surface which contrasted with the ‘modern’ settings he gave them. Another fantastical artist of the time, Ed (and Nancy) Kienholz used a wide range of materials (including papier mache) to make visceral dangerous assemblages which usually had some kind of melting or bespattered or messed up finish.

Both artists were predominantly figurative and suggested humans trapped or encased in the detritus of their times. The idea of a figure escaping from a pose, through movement, has been raised before in terms of my sculptures – also the idea of metamorphosis. Contrasting a moving human with a static backdrop is something I’d like to explore in the future. ( One simple ideas, which time allowing I may make, is a drunk falling off a bench. This would in a way triple with the other two balancing pieces in the show, and also allow me to explore the weather proofing of papier-mache. There’s a good location for this piece outside college on the benches. )

Papier-Mache has a history as long as the invention of paper. It is used in toy manufacture, craft and folk art to this very day. Here are some vivid examples from Venuzuela. The ease, low cost and flexibility of the medium lends itself to bizarre new forms like this comic centipede monster.

A recent Lincoln artist, Roy Ealden, has received some acclaim for his papier mache mulched sculptures. Although I find the treatment a little gaudy, what I like here is the use of semi-relief – I have ideas to make large scale images with hundred of small figures (made using long exposure techniques) snaking across city scenes – for example ‘exploding’ out of a tube station. One thing that is great about papier-mache is that people really understand it as a medium – it doesn’t frighten them. By allying this friendliness to a fairly abstract concept (motion in 4D) I think that an interesting conflict is set up, which leads the viewer into the piece to try and unravel its complexity of form.

Finally three artists who use not card, but paper in interesting ways. Thomas Demand shares with me a meticulous process whereby he models entire 3d scenes from colored paper. The scenes are often taken from media photographs of venues of some disturbance or historical note. The final model is then rephotographed – further displacing the viewer from the action. Below a TV studio set, which if I remember correctly (I saw the piece in Cardiff 2 years ago) was on air on German Television at the exact time of the Kennedy assassination.

Osang Gwon takes photographs of humans and then pastes these photographs to rough life-size models. The difficult concept of humans encased in their own media representation is in play, but the results are also just very ‘cool’ to look at, and his work is currently popular in media spreads, and does lend itself well to such use – I wonder if his method is protected?

Similar in style but much harder to produce are the 3D masks of Bert Simons These are made by creating a 3D digital approximation of a real face (you can do this crudely in Poser for example), and then printting a 2D geometry from the 3D model which can be folded back into 3 dimensions. Clever stuff.

Man Touching his Toes

Here are some images of my latest model. The process used was:

1) model a man touching his toes in Poser
2) export out 30 frames as OBJ files
3) run minmax.java on data to get boundaries of all 30 OBJs
4) run voxeliser3.java to convert the object into a series of 100 Y slices on a BMP.
5) run column.java to add a central square to use for aligning slices
5) project individual slices onto 6mm corrugated cardboard and trace outlines
6) cut out and assemble model (height 60cm)

I was really pleased with the final model, i didn’t check the union of the 3d files before making it so was suprised by the organic final shape.

Considerations:
The model doesn’t stand on its own feet so in the future i’ll need to consider how to fix that.
It took 2 days to build, but i think the process could be scaled up OK. A lifesize model would take maybe 2 weeks solid. I’ll be making several more of these at this scale – i’m interested to see what happens when you smoothly coat the surface – in paint or tissue, so i can color the models.

The shape was informed by a long exposure photograph which is a quick and easy way to get an idea for a shape:

25_simplifying meshes

The quotes received were higher than expected so i’ll wait until the college technicians are back as they provide a cheaper service. in the meantime i’m trying to work out how to simplify the process – which essentially means simplifying the meshes coming out of Poser.

My trial license with Magics has come to a close so i don’t have an effective BooleanUnion tool at the moment – again the solution is to make the models simpler. This doesn’t mean sacrificing detail , just getting rid of all the hidden inner meshes which contribute nothing to the sculpture and positively hinder the union.

I posted to Content Paradise the official forum for Poser about how to remove unwanted body parts and a user suggested that i look into rigging and bones for a solution. To understand this you need a basic understanding of Poser figures.

Poser Figures
A Poser figure consists of a series of 3d meshes (which are connected sets of polygons). A mesh might be a foot, or a forearm, or a chest, or an eyeball, or as small as an eyelash. The meshes fit together to make the figure – there shouldn’t be any gaps but there probably are. If the figure is clothed then the clothes replace the body mesh below, so james casual has no feet just a shoe mesh. Clothes tend to leave bigger gaps. Remember gaps aren’t important if you are rendering a 2d image which is what the majority of Poser users are doing. But if you want to create a watertight STL file then gaps are fatal. Each mesh can be displayed in any color or a texture map can be wrapped around it. There is a second part to any figure and this is the Bone Structure, these are invisible in terms of rendering but are what allows the Poser figure to move around.

each body part involved in movement has an associated Bone. Moving the bone moves the body part. The bones are connected to each other too. So every individual finger joint (30 of them) has an associated bone. Poser stores its action sequences, like walking, running, jumping, fighting etc… as bone movement sequences – which can be applied to any figure that has the appropriate bone structure. My project’s idea is to apply an action sequence and then export all the individual frames as 3d models and then BooleanUnion these to make a model to be rapid prototyped – sounds straightforward, but i am just getting to the point of establishing a fool-proof pipeline after 6 months which shows how infuriating it can be.

I put a request for help in simplifying the meshes (removing the crap i don’t need) on the Poser forum and received this reply from one of the resident Poser experts (thanks juanmanuel):

The suggested method was
1. export a figure as an OBJ file
2. in a 3d modelling program (Rhino) tidy up the figure – remove crap
3. import the tidy model – imported objects become props in Poser (that is boneless)
4. add back in the bones from the original figure
5. now the simplified figure is ready for movement and exporting

Sounds reasonable but in practise it was a bit of a nightmare (as much is in Poser). The main problem is in getting the bones into exactly the same places as before. This problem in turn is dependent on Poser’s scaling issues. briefly (and I don’t understand this in depth) Poser has its own unit conventions which are different from everyone elses – amazingly when you export a figure out of Poser and then import it back in without even changing it – it is a different size, and also in the wrong place.

This looks easy enough to put back (using scaling & transition functions) but when you go into the Bone Setup room and add in the original bones they don’t fit whatsoever – again Poser has some nasty interfaces which make your job harder and I couldn’t find a way to align the figure exactly with where it was before. This image shows a combination of the original and ‘cleaned’ figure (one red one cream). They should overlap completely but don’t – this error is down to something like the 7th decimal place and as the accuracy of the vertex positions is something like this (x y z coordinates)

-0.0729698 0.416975 -0.00470674

Even if you are only a few decimal places off the bone offset means that when you try to move the figure cracks begin to appear, which is what i’m trying to eradicate in the first place.

I’ll have another look at doing the bones by hand but this looks a messy method and if one bone of about 80 is off a little you get some strange figure mutations. So in desperation I started to look for other ways to simplify the process.

OBJ Files

Poser can import and export figures as OBJ files which is a text formatted file (which is good because it can be edited by hand). An OBJ file at its simplest is a list of vertices (x,y,z coordinates) and then a list of polygon faces which use typically 4 of the vertice faces. Each body section is split from the others with a command like usemtl Fingernail, which tells the program which texture map to use for each body part. Crucially it allows you to cut out large sections of vertices which you don’t want. So this offered part of a solution.

So for example below is an image of the Right Toe (which is the front end of the shoe for clothed figures) and the code which draws it. There is an internal surface (in green) which i want to remove (because it messes up BooleanUnions later in the pipeline), so you can hunt down the associated polygon faces in the OBJ file and comment them out (by putting a # in front of them as shown).

So the Right toe can be simplified.

Here is a list of all the usemtl parts for a single Poser figure (James Casual from Poser 6) – i’ve added the line numbers at which the line appears out of a 130,000 line OBJ file.

3742:usemtl pants
4445:usemtl Tshirt3
4824:usemtl pants
5495:usemtl Tshirt3
6740:usemtl Tshirt3
7478:usemtl Head
7525:usemtl SkinBody
7586:usemtl Head
7591:usemtl SkinBody
27252:usemtl Gums
28189:usemtl Tongue
28941:usemtl Gums
29028:usemtl Tongue
29030:usemtl Gums
29075:usemtl Tongue
29100:usemtl Gums
29123:usemtl Tongue
29136:usemtl TeethBottom
29650:usemtl TeethTop
30261:usemtl TopEyelashes
30310:usemtl BottomEyelashes
30359:usemtl TopEyelashes
30408:usemtl BottomEyelashes
30457:usemtl Head
32364:usemtl Gums
32769:usemtl Tongue
32771:usemtl Gums
32816:usemtl Tongue
32818:usemtl TeethBottom
33449:usemtl TeethTop
34046:usemtl Head
35919:usemtl Tshirt3
37571:usemtl Tshirt3
40119:usemtl SkinBody
40199:usemtl Tshirt3
40776:usemtl SkinBody
41851:usemtl SkinBody
42499:usemtl SkinBody
42909:usemtl SkinBody
43547:usemtl FingerNails
43597:usemtl SkinBody
43698:usemtl FingerNails
43703:usemtl SkinBody
44060:usemtl SkinBody
44462:usemtl SkinBody
45231:usemtl FingerNails
45292:usemtl SkinBody
45421:usemtl FingerNails
45428:usemtl SkinBody
45791:usemtl SkinBody
46193:usemtl SkinBody
46953:usemtl FingerNails
47012:usemtl SkinBody
47141:usemtl FingerNails
47144:usemtl SkinBody
47508:usemtl SkinBody
47910:usemtl SkinBody
48670:usemtl FingerNails
48737:usemtl SkinBody
48859:usemtl FingerNails
48862:usemtl SkinBody
49223:usemtl SkinBody
49611:usemtl SkinBody
50392:usemtl FingerNails
50459:usemtl SkinBody
50590:usemtl FingerNails
50593:usemtl SkinBody
52220:usemtl Tshirt3
53872:usemtl Tshirt3
56420:usemtl SkinBody
56500:usemtl Tshirt3
57077:usemtl SkinBody
58152:usemtl SkinBody
58800:usemtl SkinBody
59161:usemtl SkinBody
59832:usemtl FingerNails
59882:usemtl SkinBody
59999:usemtl FingerNails
60004:usemtl SkinBody
60361:usemtl SkinBody
60763:usemtl SkinBody
61532:usemtl FingerNails
61593:usemtl SkinBody
61722:usemtl FingerNails
61729:usemtl SkinBody
62092:usemtl SkinBody
62494:usemtl SkinBody
63254:usemtl FingerNails
63313:usemtl SkinBody
63442:usemtl FingerNails
63445:usemtl SkinBody
63809:usemtl SkinBody
64211:usemtl SkinBody
64971:usemtl FingerNails
65038:usemtl SkinBody
65160:usemtl FingerNails
65163:usemtl SkinBody
65518:usemtl SkinBody
65905:usemtl SkinBody
66692:usemtl FingerNails
66759:usemtl SkinBody
66891:usemtl FingerNails
66894:usemtl SkinBody
72375:usemtl pants
77647:usemtl pants
90003:usemtl SoleShoe
90019:usemtl Sole
90021:usemtl SoleShoe
90023:usemtl Sole
90026:usemtl SoleShoe
90029:usemtl Sole
90033:usemtl SoleShoe
90035:usemtl Sole
90039:usemtl SoleShoe
90041:usemtl Sole
90045:usemtl SoleShoe
90047:usemtl Sole
90051:usemtl SoleShoe
90071:usemtl Sole
90073:usemtl SoleShoe
90077:usemtl Sole
90079:usemtl SoleShoe
90083:usemtl Sole
90085:usemtl SoleShoe
90089:usemtl Sole
90091:usemtl SoleShoe
90095:usemtl Sole
90097:usemtl SoleShoe
90120:usemtl Sole
90122:usemtl SoleShoe
90126:usemtl Sole
90128:usemtl SoleShoe
90132:usemtl Sole
90134:usemtl SoleShoe
90138:usemtl Sole
90140:usemtl SoleShoe
90210:usemtl Sole
90213:usemtl SoleShoe
90216:usemtl Sole
90219:usemtl SoleShoe
90222:usemtl Sole
90224:usemtl SoleShoe
90227:usemtl Sole
90229:usemtl SoleShoe
90232:usemtl Sole
90234:usemtl SoleShoe
90237:usemtl Sole
90239:usemtl SoleShoe
90242:usemtl Sole
90244:usemtl SoleShoe
90247:usemtl Sole
90249:usemtl SoleShoe
90252:usemtl Sole
90254:usemtl SoleShoe
90257:usemtl Sole
90259:usemtl SoleShoe
90893:usemtl Sole
90917:usemtl SoleShoe
91066:usemtl Sole
91724:usemtl laces
92157:usemtl bow
92964:usemtl Sole
92982:usemtl SkinBody
93038:usemtl pants
93614:usemtl SoleShoe
93621:usemtl Sole
93624:usemtl SoleShoe
93627:usemtl Sole
93663:usemtl laces
93696:usemtl Sole
93720:usemtl SkinBody
93732:usemtl pants
96325:usemtl SoleShoe
96708:usemtl Sole
97107:usemtl SoleShoe
97110:usemtl Sole
102691:usemtl pants
108002:usemtl pants
120358:usemtl SoleShoe
120374:usemtl Sole
120376:usemtl SoleShoe
120378:usemtl Sole
120381:usemtl SoleShoe
120384:usemtl Sole
120388:usemtl SoleShoe
120390:usemtl Sole
120394:usemtl SoleShoe
120396:usemtl Sole
120400:usemtl SoleShoe
120402:usemtl Sole
120406:usemtl SoleShoe
120426:usemtl Sole
120428:usemtl SoleShoe
120432:usemtl Sole
120434:usemtl SoleShoe
120438:usemtl Sole
120440:usemtl SoleShoe
120444:usemtl Sole
120446:usemtl SoleShoe
120450:usemtl Sole
120452:usemtl SoleShoe
120475:usemtl Sole
120477:usemtl SoleShoe
120481:usemtl Sole
120483:usemtl SoleShoe
120487:usemtl Sole
120489:usemtl SoleShoe
120493:usemtl Sole
120495:usemtl SoleShoe
120565:usemtl Sole
120568:usemtl SoleShoe
120571:usemtl Sole
120574:usemtl SoleShoe
120577:usemtl Sole
120579:usemtl SoleShoe
120582:usemtl Sole
120584:usemtl SoleShoe
120587:usemtl Sole
120589:usemtl SoleShoe
120592:usemtl Sole
120594:usemtl SoleShoe
120597:usemtl Sole
120599:usemtl SoleShoe
120602:usemtl Sole
120604:usemtl SoleShoe
120607:usemtl Sole
120609:usemtl SoleShoe
120612:usemtl Sole
120614:usemtl SoleShoe
121248:usemtl Sole
121272:usemtl SoleShoe
121421:usemtl Sole
122079:usemtl laces
122512:usemtl bow
123319:usemtl Sole
123337:usemtl SkinBody
123393:usemtl pants
123969:usemtl SoleShoe
123976:usemtl Sole
123979:usemtl SoleShoe
123982:usemtl Sole
124018:usemtl laces
124051:usemtl Sole
124075:usemtl SkinBody
124087:usemtl pants
126680:usemtl SoleShoe
127063:usemtl Sole
127462:usemtl SoleShoe
127465:usemtl Sole

The good news is many of the parts i wanted to remove are quite clearly seperated out, including tongues, teeth, eyelashes, fingernails, eye parts. The bad news for James Casual is the shoes which look to have been designed by a different (and messier) 3d modeller , making it very fiddly (like a days work) to seperate what you don’t want like shoelaces & inner soles. On the plus side you only have to do this once as every Poser pose of James Casual will always export the polygons in exactly the same order.

So now i have a program written in Java which takes an OBJ file and tidies it up. Unfortunately even when this is imported into Rhino (and then Joined, FillMeshHoles, UnifyMeshNormals to create a mesh with no naked edges), when you try and BooleanUnion this with another tidied figure Rhino can’t handle this. There may be ways around this – the problem stems from the FillMeshHole instruction filling holes which don’t exist (like across the midriff) in terms of the overall figure – but Rhino isn’t to know this and looks to fill across any mesh edges even those already Joined. One idea i’m looking at is to export all the Legs individually and fill these. Then union the legs, then do the same for the other body sections- eg chest,head,feet, arms and then reunite the parts later. But this seems like a lot of unnecessary unioning. Secondly there are a bunch of export variables from Poser which may help like Welding joins etc.

As i hope to BooleanUnion something like 200 figures (for a man walking across a room) i’ll need a safer process – when i get back to college and can use Magics STL again i think it will be able to handle these BooleanUnions, as i did with the Golem figure, but that’s why that software costs £4000 and Rhino costs £100. I’m looking to try and get an extended trial with the Materialise people (the sellers of Magics who work with artists including Peter Jansen) or other software solutions – i must have tried at least 15 different 3d modelling packages by now. I note that Peter is currently only making figures with about 30 unions so perhaps even magics would be stretched by more. So out of continuing frustration, and after seeing that i can get my hands on the actual 3d data, i decided to test out a radically different approach which may solve the Union problem and also differentiate my work from Peter’s.