I seem to have reach a point of diminishing returns.   Having made 
another museum visit I got a clearer idea of these Bamana masks having 
found many more examples than on my first trip.  Still none happen to 
resemble the relatively light brownish color of the photo which I come 
cloer to here.

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Jim Charter wrote:

The ear looks improved, and the model as a whole is extremely tight. 
Preferred the old background, though. I can with the new background 
quite easily imagine an entire African scene with elephants waking 
across a misty field. The old background wass less revealing, more "dark 
continent", reminding me of some mysterious found object. From where had 
it come? What was its purpose? An object without "background" from which 
clues could only be obtained by study of the object itself.

The old texture appeared to be completely covered in tool marks. This 
has been disastrously lost in this latest version. The scarring has been 
diminished as well, and the "character" (parents always said, "it adds 
character" when I was upset about scarring up one of my toys or shoes.) 
given to the mask by the prominent scar on the nose has diminished along 
with that scar.

  -Shay

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Hey Jim, been admiring your masks. I have a difficult time seeing this as
wood and metal but I just like the appearance as being a bit mysterious
anyhow. That way I can imagine it being some sort of wood, stone, clay, or
metal.

I searched for such a mask and found, within two clicks on links, what looks
like the twin of yours here.

http://www.hamillgallery.com/BAMANA/BamanaMasks/BamanaMask14.html

The photo shows, what looks to me, like a dry, dusty wood with thin,
corroding metal (of unknown type) overlay. The wood and metal aren't
entirely distinguishable from each other except for the wood being lighter
in color, opposite of what you chose to do. Yours seems newer and oiled by
comparison. The modelling itself already looked right to me, even without
having seen the photo, but now it's even more obvious how well you recreated
the real thing.

BTW, makes me think of some kind of Roman helmet, so I found a photo of one
of those, too.

http://community.webshots.com/s/image4/9/95/98/57999598QUQzGF_ph.jpg

Bob H.

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Hughes, B. wrote:
> Hey Jim, been admiring your masks. I have a difficult time seeing this as
> wood and metal but I just like the appearance as being a bit mysterious
> anyhow. That way I can imagine it being some sort of wood, stone, clay, or
> metal.
> 
> I searched for such a mask and found, within two clicks on links, what looks
> like the twin of yours here.
> 
> http://www.hamillgallery.com/BAMANA/BamanaMasks/BamanaMask14.html


That's my boy!  Actually it was example BamanaMask06 that I was looking 
at more often, but I was only trying for a level of accuracy that would 
encompass either of those sources.
> 
> The photo shows, what looks to me, like a dry, dusty wood with thin,
> corroding metal (of unknown type) overlay. The wood and metal aren't
> entirely distinguishable from each other except for the wood being lighter
> in color, opposite of what you chose to do. Yours seems newer and oiled by
> comparison. 

Yes exactly, it is that dry, dusty shine that I am finding so elusive.
And I was really hoping to get it. OTOH, the masks at the Met are all 
very much darker and, in fact, have an oily sheen or dull lustre, 
probably from either vegetable dyes or possibly the wood being of a dark 
variety. One example has the deep black-reds of mahogany. Different 
masks show that wood of radically different types is used.  Some has the 
broad grain of softwood, probably even kiln treated, some the dense 
tangled grain of tropical hardwood.  Yet in worn spots this dense wood 
still has more of a "punky" appearance than the fibrous look I would 
expect from a harder wood. The obvoius softwoods are still color almost 
black though. There are more lighter, drier, weathered looking woods but 
they are usually from Eastern Africa / Madagascar.  The exhibits don't 
say the type of wood. When I try to take this model in the darker 
direction, it tends to look like a chocolate bunny.  I still think a lot 
has to do with the difficulty of getting a lot of crisp minutia on the 
surface which would allow a high spec but would still matt things down. 
When you average a lot of tectures you seem to get the molten feel.  I 
also tried converting to functions and adding or multiplying them but it 
was indeterminate whether this improved things. I feel like I've thrown 
everything but the kitchen sink at it including using finish maps with 
mlpov.  The crackle pattern with the form modifier that I am using to 
get the vague sense of scalloping also has a finish map applied, with 
the 'ridges' being higher spec lower roughness and the hollows lower 
spec higher roughness. Whatever.  I really thought that might also be 
the key.  The look of worn and burnished wood seems to be precisely that 
the high parts look polished and the hollows, matt.  Whatever.

The metal mask part could use a lot more attention, it's is almost an 
afterthought, but I think I'll give the whole thing a rest for now. In 
the photos it looks shiny.  In NO museum exhibits does it look this way. 
  It lots very matt and colored of a piece with the wood. BTW of 
possible interest to Wings users, the mesh for the metal mask was used 
without any smoothing being applied on export. It is just the raw 
"cage".  The embossed bumps are in the geometry, their is no bump map used.


The modelling itself already looked right to me, even without
> having seen the photo, but now it's even more obvious how well you recreated
> the real thing.

Thank's. I still need to achieve a more crudely hacked at appearance. 
Maybe this is obvious, maybe not, I came to the whole African Mask thing 
precisely for the technical reason that that Hamill Gallery site has 
dead-on front and profile axial views of the objects. With that kind of 
  reference you can model with a lot more confidence. That and that I 
knew that I really am not good enough yet to do realistic human faces 
and I thought the slightly crude, exaggerated forms of the masks would 
provide a laboratory for learning mesh modelling.  Also a longtime 
fascination with how maskmakers use materials.  Tactility, as I have 
often trumpeted on these groups.  Now I am interested in the 
anthromorphism, the projection of sentience, which obviously connects 
with a lot of cg and other issues.
> 
> BTW, makes me think of some kind of Roman helmet, so I found a photo of one
> of those, too.
>  

I hurry through those parts of the museum lest I get sucked in ;)
But yeah, I need to teeeeear myself away from this particular model.

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Shay wrote:


> Preferred the old background, though. I can with the new background 
> quite easily imagine an entire African scene with elephants waking 
> across a misty field. 

Both versions are simply intended to be artificial.  I can go either 
way.  The darker version gives you only the highlighted areas of the 
model sort of looming in the murk; the ligher version shows up the 
darkened profile of the shaded part of the model also. Makes it more of 
an artifact.  I can go either way.  I do like the expressive potential 
of murk.

There is the potential for real tromp l'oeil when the shaded profile is 
missing.  In my youth I worked in the headworks of a gold mine quite far 
north.  It was a night shift job and I would stare out over the dark 
tundra, caught in an internal loop of thoughts about how it was 
basically trackless waste until you get to Russia,... until I'd spook 
myself out.  Then I would turn and there was this particular gear case 
that was sort of a soft egg shape, like a human head.  A steep, raking 
light would fall across some dust patterns on it, and I tell ya, I'd 
jump right out of my wellingtons.

If I may add, I think the angle of the light source is also significant. 
  The steeper angle in the first example casting deep shadows on the 
upper lips and cheeks also gave the mask a certain mystery or even 
psychic presence.  A cheap effect, but one that always seems to work.
> 
> The old texture appeared to be completely covered in tool marks. This 
> has been disastrously lost in this latest version. 

LOL! You know how to hurt a guy.  It was precisely those tool marks, 
especially the scalloping from a shallow gouge or draw-knife, that I was 
trying to get!  In the previous version I intersected widely scaled 
dents patterns with extreme variations on the poly_wave to get that 
effect.  In this version I tried spotted, radial, spiral, cosines (Jaime 
uses cosines for his water far as I can tell),...I had some better 
success with intersecting gradients but I finally returned to the trusty 
crackle pattern modified with form <1,.3,0>.  In the museum there are 
some surfaces that look more like POV crackle than they do like carved 
surfaces.  So in theory it should work.  I think the problem might be 
that I was trying for the extreme shallowness of the tool marks in the 
photo reference rather than something deeper and more obvious.

I theory, I should also have improved on the random surface marking with 
some varied but classic use of the dents pattern.  The finer texture 
effects you are seeing in the earlier version is mostly a dense wood 
pattern, with quite a lot of turbulence, faintly averaged into the 
overall normal.

Oh well, life in the lower strata. ;)  Thanks for keeping me honest.

I was up until maybe five this morning, Poving of course, then was 
wakened by a call from a temping agency around 9:30.  Fish the turtles 
out of the bath tub, wash and on with the interview suit, down there by 
10:30 only to be told that the recruiter had made a 'mistake' calling me 
in.  I think I was being told that they'd really meant to loose my 
resume but this newbie didn't know that.

It's a brand new day :)

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