Saturday, November 06, 2010

Meshes in Art History

A few of the more analytic artists of the Renaissance sometimes modeled with geometric meshes. Coincidentally, this is one of the fundamental techniques of computer graphics. Its appearance in the Renaissance shows a playful reductionism at work.

Here is a rudimentary primer on the concepts of mesh modeling. The challenge of this technique is managing your edge loops and poles.

Albrecht Durer
Paulo Uccello
Much of Paulo Uccello's work is bound up in the technical demonstration of mechanical perspective. This was before the technique of perspective became ossified and pedantic. A checkered torus sometimes appears in his murals and drawings as a show of technical mastery. They look like invaders from another plane of reality.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great! I'm pleased someone else has noticed the parallels between the Renaissance exploration of perspective and modern computer modelling.

I did an interview with Ubisoft Montreal(Assasins Creed 2) artist Gilles Beloeil where we discussed this a bit further.

Feel free to have a look
http://2.ly/dvrv

Kind Regards
H