Research Poster
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog – Caspar David Friedrich, 1818 / 3D recreation in Blender
First Draft
The research poster was something very important we were supposed to produce at the end of semester one. During our lectures with Chris Rowland, we got to see great examples from previous years and received good tips and recommendations for our own designs. Since my research was all about romanticism and 3D modelling, I figured I could make a classical sculpture in the middle of the poster with some wireframe elements to indicate 3D modelling.
To save time, I opened the ZBrush demo head to be my base sculpt and then started sculpting on top of it to more remind of the marble statue of David by Michelangelo. At this point, I didn’t seem to mind that the era of the sculpture I was referring to was the completely wrong timeline and art movement. Go figures.
I used the ZBrush and Blender plug-in called GOZ which allows me to export and import models instantaneously between the software with just one click of a button. For some reason, models turn up upside down in Blender, but other than that the plug-in works really well.
In Blender, I added some studio light with a soft pinkish hue and hit cycles render. I realised right away that the depth of the sculpture wasn’t enough which left the shadows too soft and the facial features too difficult to see. So again with the one-click I sent the model back to ZBrush and carved the details out more distinctly.
Back in Blender I created a duplicate of the bust, set a decimate modifier on the duplicate to make a low poly version, then applied another modifier and set it to wireframe. Through this, I was able to create the mesh wireframe effect on top of the existing model as Blender doesn’t support wireframe renders as ZBrush does.
I then created the poster titles using text mesh in Blender, rendered them out as transparent PNGs and imported them in InDesign where I put the poster together. I felt like the bust wasn’t really working on its own so I ended up modelling a replica of the Finnish traditional necklace and a weird horn thing that was found in the Museovirasto gallery.
Unfortunately, even though I was happy with the end result and the render looked clean and nice, I got feedback telling me that the image didn’t really remind them of my research. After hours of working on the piece, I tried to justify to myself that it was okay and was on the verge to leave it as it was until I had to admit that they were of course right and I was just blinded by the hours I had used making it. In the end, it really didn’t really have anything to do with my research other than looking pretty.
I still liked the overall design of the two columns on the sides and the big image in the middle, as well as the mesh effect indicating the 3D modelling. I got a great idea from the tutors as they reminded me of the 3D recreation I did earlier on the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. So in the bin went the first version and in came the second.
Second Draft
So after a good while away from the Wanderer piece I once again opened it in Blender and made it a little better than what it was before. The original wasn’t as true to the painting in terms of pose and placements of the models, so this time I made sure to line everything correctly so that the end result would be closer to the original painting.
I did the same wireframe modifier trick with all of the models from the scene to create the second “unfinished half” of the painting and decided to add a smaller similar image to the poster as well. I used the sketch of Lemminkäinen at the Fiery Lake by Robert Ekman, 1867 as the reference image and then again used MakeHuman to create the base human mesh and then built up from there with very low poly modelling as the image was going to be very tiny. I used it as fig. 1 on my poster.
I also changed the fonts on the titles to be more readable, added transparent columns behind the texts and cleaned the timeline to be more with the overall design. In the end, I was very happy with the end result, even though it wasn’t what I had first envisioned. Now the picture in the middle makes sense and is more in line with my research and the poster is a lot more readable than it was before. It’s still very text heavy, but I was okay with that as that’s pretty much my research summarised, all text and too much information even though it’s very interesting and fun to me!
