Blender Experimentation #1

I'm not very creative about post titles, so I'm going to start calling these "Blender Experimentation #[n]." This doesn't apply retroactively to the stuff I posted before today.

Today's experiment involved this female head model from Blendswap.
I was inspired by the 'exploding faces' style on this other model from Blendswap.
I created my version of the exploding faces as such:

• Duplicate the head (I used two duplicate layers)
• Displacement modifier to scale along normals
• Build modifier, or randomly select faces in edit mode, to break down the head
• Manually delete areas of too much detail (mainly the facial features)

Lighting was done with Environment lighting only and the material is the result of briefly experimenting with settings using Toon for both the Diffuse and Specular shaders.

No nodes or Freestyle

Edge Nodes

Freestyle

Edge nodes and some extra fun with the compositor

It reminds me of cover art for Mona Lisa Overdrive.

My other main project today was reading about copyright law. There are some literary works I'd love to try adapting as graphic novels. Many are not public domain nor will they be anytime soon. I'm mostly interested in releasing any work I do for free online, which is unlikely to be a problem (complete text of these novels is all over the internet, free of charge). But if I ever wanted to a print run, I might find myself unable to negotiate a reasonable contract for the rights to do so (I doubt the estate of some of these authors would be interested in dealing with such a small print run anyway...they save their efforts for dealing with big movie studios). I may very well still attempt to work on these projects, maybe just focusing on a few key scenes, but with the understanding that they will be purely a free and online sort of work. I could always do merchandising I bet, since the actual novel text or story won't play into that, and my visualization of the characters would be an example of a highly transformative type of work.

• Female Head by norby