Carrara

A short cinematic experience of the creation of Michelangelo's David.

The project was intended to show David's creation, more than a statue, but a human being at an internal level. From raw material to a single marble block, to bones, to muscles, to marbleized skin, David is shown in ways only Visual Effects could bring to life.

I am responsible for all aspects. This animation is accompanied by a piano recital of Claire de Lune that I performed.

Software: ZBrush | Maya | Houdini | Photoshop | Illustrator | Substance Painter | Redshift | Nuke | Audition | After Effects | Premiere Pro

The inspiration came from my recent trip to Italy, where I was able to witness Michelangelo's David in person. It is absolutely the most magnificent artwork I have ever seen. Fast forwarding several months later as I approached the end of my MA, my memories of this trip came back, and I knew I wanted to do something involving this sculpture. I wanted to bring it to life, so I decided to create an écorché model of David, which would show off his bones and muscles as well as the figure we know today.

I started by gathering references of David, but especially focused on learning proper anatomy by purchasing the Anatomy for Sculpture books by Uldis Zarins. I collected hundreds of images focusing on each section I was modeling at the time.

The first phase of my project consisted of individually modelling each bone in the human body. It was a long process, but a good first step getting back into ZBrush. I took into careful consideration the proportions of David, and spent many hours perfecting each bone.

Next came the muscles, which were challenging, as there are even more muscles in the human body than bones. It was another long process, but I individually sculpted and learned the names of each muscles in the human body. Some internal facing muscles were not modeled, but any muscle that would be visible from the exterior.

Next came the final skin layer. This was surprisingly quicker to sculpt, as the base from the bones and muscles gave me a great foundation to work off of. The skin was shaded as a separate mesh on top of the existing bones and muscles, making sure that everything fit inside. David's face was the most challenging and time consuming, as I did my best to capture his likeness.

Next I posed the models by using TPose Master in Zbrush. For the bones, I manually moved them into place as I did not want any distortion of the mesh caused by bending or stretching.

Next came some additional models, including the base David stands on, a portion of the Carrara quarries (where the marble was sourced from) and the Academia where the sculpture resides today.

I started texturing by creating high poly meshes in ZBrush for most assets and baking the information onto low poly meshes. I did all the texturing in Substance Painter.

I used Gaea to create some backdrop assets for the initial exterior shots of the animation.

For the transition scene from exterior to interior, I wanted to have the marble cube shatter, revealing the skeleton. I created an RBD fracture simulation in Houdini and retimed it to explode in slow-motion. It was a great learning experience as I learned more about Houdini effects and simulations.

The final animation consisted of 21 shots which were composted in Nuke. Most backgrounds (especially in the Academia scenes) were rendered as still images and composited to save on render times.

I play piano as well, and I knew I wanted to incorporate it into the final animation. I decided to play a rendition of Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy as the background music. Playing the music myself helped me time my shots and get a vision of what the animation could look like in my head ahead of time.

I also edited the music and ambient sound effects in Adobe Audition.

Final renders were done in Houdini utilizing Redshift. I was able to do all renders locally on my machine without the need of a render farm. I was very surprised and pleased with the speed and results of each render, especially that the final animation was about 2 minutes long, requiring hundreds of rendered frames.

And with this project done, I am ready to go back to Italy!