Redraw, skintight armor Emily Smirle: I

Redraw, skintight armor

Emily Smirle submitted:

I had a look at the picture from here and facepalmed especially badly. I like armored women with swords kicking ass. This isn’t it.

I wanted to do a redraw, but my art isn’t drawing, it’s CGI. But, that ties in here, because there’s a niche area of CGI where the idea is simply “Provide a model to “draw from life” from, when you can’t afford/access a real model to pose for you.  It lets you get things like perspective and posing and “no, joints don’t actually do that” down, because the programs won’t let you do completely impossible joint rotations/bends. I recommend some of the artists you’ve highlighted get themselves something like this if they can’t get into real-life life-drawing classes, and can’t hire someone to come pose for them for their professional work…

To illustrate some of what’s wrong with that picture I set up a scene trying to match it as closely as possible. Even being allowed to cheat (more on that later) I couldn’t match the pose exactly - it’s just not physically possible. But here’s a good start - and this lets me pick out a lot of the problems with the picture, because I can take my camera around and look at her from the side…

To get this close I had to shorten her right thigh, lengthen her left shin, lengthen the top part of her ribcage, shorten and distort her abdominal area, and I still couldn’t duplicate it.

To duplicate it, the top section of her torso (top of shoulders down to top of breasts) would have to be a separate segment that can rotate independantly, and the rest of her torso would have to bend back OVER her right thigh into the background, while her shoulders and head somehow simultaniously go forward. Talk about Eschergirls.

So if we take our camera around to stage right (our left) here’s what it looks like:

Things to note: Her left leg is supposed to be her front leg, out in front to stabilize her as she comes forward/down off that pile of rocks. There is NO WAY that’s possible. She’s also stabbing herself in her head.

On the original, which I wasn’t able to match due to not even CGI figures wanting to be twisted around like that… she’s sticking her butt out (as in this picture) but then wrapping her torso over her left thigh to the back (check out the lines up the center of her torso - she’s leaning BACK over that leg).

This is not a balanced position, and the artist has a bizarre sense of “in front” and “in behind”.

If the artist had used a life model, even a family member who doesn’t look anything like the character, he would have caught these problems.

If the artist had used a wooden doll or a CGI doll, he also would have caught this - he could look at it in 3 dimensions, move around the figure, and see how totally freeking impossible it was.

This is REALLY interesting!  And it’s also a really great idea to re-create one of these poses in 3d art and seeing what it looks like from other angles.  Also that’s some excellent analysis, and I don’t think I have much else to add, except that, unfortunately, I don’t think “balanced and effective fighting position” was chief priority for the artist.