This started as a demonstration of what can happen in Poser, a software package for creating and rendering 3D figure-based art, if you take a human model and distort it too much. Figures in Poser have a series of dials called "morphs." A morph applies either to the whole body or just a piece of it. An example of a morph would be "scale." Normally, it's at 100%, but you can make it smaller or larger by any percentage.
The human models also have more complicated morphs relating to how the human body actually moves. The various joints can be bent, twisted, or moved side-to-side, whether or not that movement is normally possible by the human body. For example, the shoulder joint can perform all three of these movements, but the elbow only does one. No matter, in Poser you can do all three, and in fact microadjustments of such "impossible" moves sometimes actually makes sense.
But even the "impossible" movements can be set too far. You can bend an elbow joint so far, the forearm passes through the upper arm and out the other side. Or you can adjust it in the other direction far enough that the elbow bends backwards. It's all just images on a screen, but it's an interesting component of our psychological makeup that we cringe at the sight of something that isn't human but *looks* human bending in weird ways.
The following picture was my first demonstration of how Poser can do things like this.
Most of the unnatural contortions are obvious and need not be pointed out. Note, though, that the hips are twisted in one direction, while the midriff is twisted in the opposite direction -- both possible moves in the human body, just not at the same time.
The rings around the eyes are actually his pupils, dilated so far they protrude outside his head.
Too low, and the corners of the mouth pull in so far, they protrude out from the rest of the surrounding flesh. The cheeks droop off the face.
Too high, and the cheeks and corners of the mouth pull away in the other direction. The chin gets stretched so taut, the teeth protrude from behind.
To give you an idea of how much faces can be manipulated in Poser, note that the model used for the Nightmare Woman is the exact same one used for Teresa, the RinkWorks subscriber. (The Nightmare Man is perhaps more recognizably the one used for Bruce.)
Use the left and center images for parallel viewing. Use the center and right images for cross-over viewing. Unfortunately, the smaller versions are more pixellated, because they're resized by the browser instead of rendered from scratch.
With parallel viewing, the left eye sees the left image, and the right eye sees the right image. You get the 3D effect by looking past the screen. With cross-eyed, the left eye sees the right image, and vice versa. You see the 3D effect by looking in front of the screen.
Here are smaller versions, if those are easier for your eyes to see:
In this case, it also adds to the nightmare effect. It looks like the guy's body is just shaking itself apart.
Here's the animated image, not embedded here on this page, since it's really annoying to try to read text when it's anywhere on your screen.
This is powerful, because it allows you to set literally hundreds of different morphs for the starting and ending frames, and no matter how complicated the resulting movements, Poser produces gradual movement on every single morph to achieve the proper effect.
I thought it might be interesting to render a few quick animations of the Nightmare Man starting out in a normal, neutral pose, then gradually being distorted beyond all sense of reality.
The animations are a few megs each, so I have not embedded them here on this page. But try following these links:
Note that the image quality is not great. This is because I converted the rendered animation frames to GIFs, which limit the color palette to 256 colors, so that I could create an animated GIF. It would have been just as easy to produce an AVI movie file, but those would be less convenient for some users to view. How about animated stereoscopes? Ok! Follow these things to view stereoscopic versions of the animations above. As with the still stereoscopes, you can look at these either with parallel viewing or cross-eyed viewing. Refer to the "Stereoscopes" section for instructions on how to view these.
For the next animation experiment, I introduce an inkling of a storyline. Note that there are black spots that appear at the corners of the mouth now and again. These were unintentional. I didn't realize it would render that way until after leaving the computer running for the 50 or so hours it took to render this animation completely.
