Trolls in the forest.

Beware! Deep in the Nordic forests the trolls lurk. If you venture there, be prepared. They may seem polite at first, even friendly, but dont be fooled. They have dark and sinister minds and will do you no good.

The last few weeks have disappeared in a blur of work. I have had far to much external examiner work as well as a busy time at my day-job. My daughter has finished her exams and I have spent time helping her with her math exam as well.
she did well at the exam but I cant help but wonder, what you do if you don't have a Phd in mathematical modelling to help you with your exam preparations. Well part of that was answered by my daughter who promptly redistributed as much as possible of her insights to her friends.
Finally, this Friday was my last exam and the kids all started their summer vacation. I expect the next few weeks until my vacation starts to be very quiet. I am unsure how this works in other countries, but in Denmark July is universally acknowledged as a period where nothing happens. This is great if you belong to the select few who are at work, because you can actually get something done without being constantly interrupted.
Even so I have had the time to model a few more miniatures. I made a troll, which I also described in previous posts. here you get a few more details of the process. I started in my usual way by hacking together some simple shapes, mostly elongated spheres.
then I hit it with (hours and hours of) sculpting. Finally I decimated the mesh so that it was around 100.000 triangles all in all. This is not necessary but it does help with speed as well as quality of mesh when I start posing it.
I usually let the arms and legs be separate. It makes it a lot easier to pose and I can always smooth the transitions afterwards.
here is a turntable video I put on youtube of the first version of this troll.

And here is the print of the same troll.

I made two variant heads and poses. the poses are easy in that i just drag the skeleton around, mostly the arms actually, and adding objects like the walking stick and the big bag of stuff.
The head is a bit more involved.

Here I do a resculpt of the head, starting with rescaling to get a broader or slimmer face. Then redoing the most prominent features such as nose, ears and eyebrows. and finally redoing the neck so it fits with the body again. I also added a hat and some hair to one of them to make it look more like the ones in John Bauers images.

I had a spot of trouble printing these, mainly because I printed two large figures at the same times. One of them fell off the built plate late in the print, and so had a flat area at the top of the hat and on the back. it happened at the very end, so is could be easily mended with a little filing and some paint , but I still want to reprint the last one

I also put a few versions on shapeways to flesh out my collection there. Go see them all here