Here's the latest in my ongoing series of über-niche digital sculpture caricatures: a not-so-sorta, yet very much kinda still, accurate tableau I've been wanting to depict for a while now.
I've been a semi-closeted fan not only of The Three Stooges, but of early 20th century vaudeville and traveling shows for decades. Not sure where that came from, but from references I absorbed as a kid from the 1976-81 Muppet Show, a direct vaudeville throwback, up to the terrific new biography Shemp!, by Burt Kearns, anything in this realm that I would take in will immediately find a comfortable corner in my noggin and wait patiently for it's moment to mingle with likeminded useless nuggets knowledge.
Ask me what I had for dinner last night and I probably can't say, but I CAN recite the all of the lyrics to Lydia, The Tattooed Lady though not originally through it's debut in the Marx Brother's At the Circus, but rather, from it's performance on the aforementioned Muppet Show in 1976 (and multiple reruns) beginning when I was 3.
Fun fact, it's a common misconception that it was Ms. Piggy who stood in as Lydia in this sketch. It was not. It was a redheaded pig similar to Ms. Piggy, whose various tattoos Kermit refers to as the song goes on. Ms. Piggy does however make a brief appearance at the end of the sketch, marking her first ever jealous fit of rage debut, klobbering Kermit off the stage, in this case a mere punch that would soon evolve into her famous HIIIIII-YAH karate chop.
Where was I...
Oh yeah, anyhoo, this is a digital sculpture I threw together in a program called Zbrush.
If you're wondering why there's four figures in a model of The Three Stooges, why, I'm glad you asked!
Curly Howard, Larry Fine, Moe Howard and Shemp Howard did appear together briefly only one time on screen, in a Three Stooges Columbia Pictures short, Hold that Lion, which this vignette is modeled after.
Curly, recovering from a stroke in real life, had a cameo as a sleeping (snoring) passenger on a train.
Obviously I took some liberties with the scene, the biggest being I chose to give Curly hair. Actually, in this short, (though it's been a long time since I've seen it) to the best of my knowledge, I don't believe he actually opens his eyes in it. Shemp, Moe and Larry are walking through the train car and stop briefly to note the strange dog bark-like snoring of some random passenger (Curly). After some quick snappy dialog, Moe puts the clothespin on his nose and the snoring morphs into a different type of dog bark snore. It's really kind of a sad scene- people watching at the time probably didn't even know it was Curly.
For the technically curious, Zbrush is a digital sculpting program that's immensely intricate and frightening technical. What at the surface looks to be basically balls of clay you push and pull with a stylus on a screen ends up being waaaaay more involved than that. There's no way I could go through the ins and outs of it all here, but all I can say is, if one little setting isn't right, at the very end when you go to print... it won't. Or you'll start crashing. Or the file will start growing to the point of being unworkable.
That 3 ring binder contains all of my 18 months and counting of notes.
If I didn't keep this book, I'd be 100% lost. Nothing about this software is intuitive.
If my place ever burned up in a fire or something, this book is one of the things I'd run back and try to save. None of this is like riding a bike. If I go away from this program for a few days, I literally have to go back to the beginning of this binder and do a refresher, just to make sure I don't forget something.
Earlier this year, I got to a point where I was ready to print, and that was quite the milestone. Here's what the file looked like at that point:
I thought it looked pretty cool at this stage.
Printing offers its own set of challenges. If any little detail isn't right, it simply won't print. There's a myriad of issues that can arise- overlapping polygons is a big one, but in going back and forth with the printer, I went through probably every possible issue.
That's actually a good thing, because once THOSE issues are cleared up, you have a much cleaner model, much more workable, lower res is the term I'd use (though that's not the actual term), but shaving gigs off of a file is always a good thing.
I DO have a few printouts of this, but I don't personally have a 3D printer, so I sent things to my local library, who prints things for free. Their printers are built for quantity, so they don't get near the detail I'd want, nor the volume I'd hoped for. I sent this model at roughly 10" wide, and that would've taken over a day to print, even with their wide nozzle (resulting in the lowest resolution). So, my prints are in the 4-5 inch range. But, for the sake of having a proof, they work. And, I now know what NOT to do when building a model from the ground up, because of all the printing trial and error. Now, if I wanted to send these things off to an animator, that wouldn't be a problem, for example.
Here's some more shots of this sucker:
