In summer of 2007, while living in Orlando, FL I created a bust of a Serbian film actor Taško Načić, as portrayed in the classic Serbian 80’s movie, Davitelj protiv davitelja [Strangler vs. Strangler]. It was a fun project and it helped me get a little better at sculpting the likeness and rendering out a composition. I didn’t have high quality reference images, only some scans of magazine photos found online, so I mostly relied on the film in some low res divx or xvid video, hence having to improvise with the details. Here is what the final render looked like out of Maya:
The reason I chose this as my first sculpture to try printing out on our new Creality CR-6 SE 3D printer is that it has quite an interesting story behind it. In 2011 I spent five weeks in Serbia, and during that time I visited Belgrade to meet with some friends. While waiting for them to show up, I hung out in a coffee shop with my partner, and he was just browsing some newspapers (it was Blic, to be precise) that were left at the table. He saw a page with crossword puzzles and showed it to me, saying that the picture there looked familiar. Lo and behold, it was the image above! It was such a crazy synchronicity, especially since browsing newspapers is something that me or my man hardly ever do. As seen in first image, I did keep the newspaper.
I had this render on my old website, so it showed in image search results and it had to be the largest image of this actor, since it is also featured here – https://www.fanphobia.net/find/?searchTerm=tasko+nacic – as the only “photo” of this man. Has this image been mistaken for a photograph? Quite possibly, though it wouldn’t fool those who know what to look for as sign of a 3D render. When I first started getting into 3D at the turn of the century (that makes it sound like it was ages ago) there was a quiz in 3D magazine that asked readers to guess which is “real” (a photograph) and which came out of a 3D program, and even back then it was hard to tell. Now just imagine how much of what we see in media is CG, including most images coming out of NASA, yet for some reason many people think those are photographs too. That’s why many believe that planets actually look like shader swatches in a 3D program, which is very unlike what we see: twinkling lights in the night sky.
As for the 3D print, it was done without supports, so it has some loose bits of filament under each overhang. It also has some holes in the collar. I already sanded most of it and it looks better, but I would like to try using Bondo or similar filler to fill the holes, and then paint it.
Addendum: the print got repaired with pyrography pen, and painted, this is the result:
