
Then we made the armature to fit that mold, and then foam latex was injected inside the mould and put into an oven.” The main body started out as a sculpture, then a plaster mold was pulled from that. “The spider creature was made out of parts I had literally just found at hardware and hobby stores, pieces of Tupperware and PVC pipes. “It was what I like to call a little bit rubber band and chewing gum effects,” suggests Punchatz. He and a small team referenced id sketches and then fashioned a maquette out of an underlying steel armature, foam latex and a collection of somewhat rudimentary bits and pieces. ‘Scary but over-the-top’ was Punchatz’s brief. It was a hideous brain-shaped creature on mechanical arachnid-like legs. Punchatz was immediately brought on to craft a stop-motion model of Doom’s final boss, the Spider Mastermind. This is how I had imagined a game always should be, walking around in three dimensions and battling creatures.
#Maquette definition software
“My dad told the guys at id, ‘My son does this this stuff for a living, you might want to give him a call!’” Punchatz tells us.Īfter hearing from id Software artist Kevin Cloud, Punchatz visited the company to see the work in progress on Doom: “Frankly, I was blown away. These were projects where Punchatz learnt from the likes of Rob Bottin, Phil Tippett and Rick Baker, some of the greatest special effects artists in the industry. Already he’d contributed to films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, RoboCop and its sequels, and Coming to America. It was really incredible to see.Īt the time, Greg Punchatz had a fledgling career in practical, make-up and animatronics special effects. He thought he might know someone who could help – his son Greg.ĭoom was how I had imagined a game always should be, walking around in three dimensions and battling creatures. A solution arrived via the artist hired to design the iconic Doom package art and logo, Don Ivan Punchatz. They wanted more intricate designs and the the ability to produce cleaner stop-motion movement into their practical creature models. When that clay modelling process also proved too cumbersome for one of the key demons, the team were in a bind. Some museums specialize in collections of maquettes, such as the Museo dei Bozzetti in Pietrasanta, Italy.Instead, id looked to hand-sculpt clay models of the demons that could then be manipulated into different poses, photographed from multiple angles, digitised, colorised and incorporated into the game as sprites. Eleven of these bozzetti were displayed in an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a sculptor from the Baroque period, made his bozzetti from wax or baked terracotta to show his patrons how the final piece was intended to look. Like oil sketches, these works in progress can be at least as much sought after as completed works by highly regarded artists, showing the process of developing an idea. Modello, unlike the other terms, is also used for sketches for two-dimensional works such as paintings.

The term may also refer to a prototype for a video game, film, or any other type of media. For commissioned sculptures, especially monumental public sculptures, a maquette may be used to show the client how the finished work will fit in the proposed site. It is the analogue of the painter's cartoon, modello, oil sketch or drawn sketch. It is used to visualize and test shapes and ideas without incurring the cost and effort of producing a full-scale product. An equivalent term is bozzetto, from the Italian word that means "sketch". For models of buildings see Architectural model.Ī maquette (French word for scale model, sometimes referred to by the Italian names plastico or modello) is a small scale model or rough draft of an unfinished sculpture. ''This article is about models of sculptures.
