Day 5- "leg poop"

So I got around to working on the legs, only to realize I know frigging nothing about leg anatomy! This didn't really stop me from working on it of course since it's not like I know the anatomy of anything else really. Except for the sartorius, artists love sartorius.....es..... sartorii? Anyway, after searching through other sculpts and images that I've collected over the years, it's apparent to me that no one really knows their leg anatomy either. I found tons and tons of different sculpts handling the muscle forms differently. Comic book artists tend to show every single friggin muscle as if batman didn't have flesh (though damn wouldn't that be a geat super hero?). The more traditionalists sculpt it really toned down and boy is it hard to make out forms that way through crappy pictures.

When I sat down and looked at the rest of my model I decided to go for more of a comic style exaggerated muscle structure for two reasons. One, so I can at least learn the muscle forms. I know nothing about the muscles of the leg because I've never practiced them and I really need to master their crazy twisted lines. Two, the rest of my character has pretty defined forms and it would be odd if he had ultra realistic legs. Plus I could always tone down muscles easier than adding to them.

I found some interesting techniques from my favorite sculptor, Ryan Kingslien, about some of the forms of the legs, like how the femur has a bend to it, giving legs an outward arching motion. I had a lot of troubles getting the muscles of the quads the way that I like and I still didn't quite hit it but I think I'm getting closer.

I think that's what I'm really working to do with this sculpt, I know that I'm not going to get a perfect anatomy sculpt this time around, but compare this to my last "best anatomy sculpt yet" image and you can really see a difference.

The lower leg was a little bit easier. I'm still just doing blocking, not really making the actual muscles but more their general form that will help me really get them looking awesome. The lower legs is mostly long verticle lines that hook everything up (to you crazy anatomy freaks out there, I'm generalizing here sheesh). The toes I pretty much handled the same as the fingers though I am proud to say that I didn't have to dynamesh this! though for future reference I should still sepperate the toes at the zsphere level because it did take a bit longer than I would have liked to get those piggies to the correct shape.

As far as form and design goes, I wanted to sort of mimic hobbit feet in how clumpy and gross they look. The armor isn't going to cover his feet so I'll be detailing that much more than say that lower back which still looks wrong.

Next up I'm going to do some fixing up of some troubling spots, come up with an armor design, and get some of it modeled in there, so stay tuned :)