3D I, Week 3, Part 2: Assignment 2

This is will be my first blog report on the second big modeling assignment we will turn in during this course.

On the Tuesday of this week, the class met up at Gotlands Museum to have a tour and to choose an object on display which we will model for this assignment. After taking the tour, I had a walk around the exhibit and chose to model a necklace.

The necklace from the exhibit I have chosen to model.

We had a guideline for what types of objects we could choose for the assignment, a couple of pages of visual guides showing what types of objects would be too simple and too complicated. As I went through this exhibit, this necklace immediately caught my eye.

The necklace was labeled “filigreed silver beads” on the display. When excavated, the necklace had been found preserved in a bronze box, alongside a second bronze box containing over 1000 coins. The objects were dated to be from around 1080 A.D. This puts the creation of the necklace in the general period of the middle ages, close to the end of the Viking age, when Gotland was a center of trade. “Filigreed” is a style of jewelry which basically means the object is shaped with many tiny pearls.

If you look closely at the streaks on these pearls, you can see how they were made using many smaller pearls.

I went through the exhibit thinking I’d rather model some sort of accessory or tool than a chest or a decorative structure. This necklace stood out among a collection of other accessories first because of its size. It’s still a relatively small object, but the pearls are big enough to be readable from a distance, and all have distinct patterns on them. There are ten pearls, of which there are two pairs of duplicates, and I thought the variety in shapes and textures of the pearls would make it a fun object to model.

For this assignment, I will model this necklace in a cartoony, Asterix and Obelix style. I chose that style because I want to emphasize and bring out the differences in design between the pearls. I would like to exaggerate the general size of the necklace, and model and texture each pearl with a focus on the basic patterns of their decorations.

An overview of the shapes and patterns of the different pearls. The first pearl from the left and second from the right are practically identical. The two almond-shaped pearls in the center are also similar, but the one on the left is noticeably thicker.

Doing this, I will likely omit some of the finer details on the pearls for simplification. As mentioned earlier, these pearls are filigreed, meaning they’re made up of countless smaller pearls. This is especially noticeable on the two almond-shaped pearls in the middle of the necklace. Given how noticeable this construction element is on the sides of those two pearls, I might decide to leave elements of that detail in my texture on those particular pearls. Otherwise, I will generally omit this detail in my model and texture-work, making the overall designs of the pearls much less cluttered.

Additionally, these pearls are all strung together on a wire. If you look closely, you can spot parts of the wire between some of the pearls, as well as the openings in the sides on the pearls themselves. To go with the simplification and silhouette clarity of a cartoony style, I will skip these gaps between the pearls in my model. These simplifications will also make model work much easier for me, as I can simply shape out the general shape of the wire, then ignore or even delete the inner part of it covered by pearls.

You can see here how the wire is visible in the gaps between certain pearls.

In class on Wednesday we briefly discussed stereotyping in designs and went through some examples of portrayals of the viking age. Horned helmets, muscly men in skimpy armor, and weapons decorated with runes. Most people are aware of how inaccurate this popular portrayal is. Recently, there was even a study proving that a considerable amount of viking skeletons were actually female.

My necklace is a bit hard to connect to this popular viking stereotype. It’s not a weapon, or a piece of armor, or a runestone, or anything usually associated with this macho war-image. The designs on the pearls don’t even contain any generic “viking age” design elements like braided snakes or runes. I don’t think there are any huge stereotypes I will have to make sure to watch out for when modeling this object.

The edge flow I drew onto my necklace to determine what shapes I want to make the pearls out of.

Lastly, Nataska showed us some examples of edge flow drawings in class. These are simple lines you draw over reference photos of the objects in photoshop to determine what basic shapes you will model from. Here you can see the edge flow I made for my necklace, and the shapes I want to start from and try to keep to while modeling the pearls.