dead bonsai trees? volume 2?
jardine
Posts: 1,215
in The Commons
i've killed one bonsai tree, and i'm deeply ashamed of that.
i would never encourage anyone to feel like killing bonsai trees would be good business, or a good way to live.
i understand that PM's business model may very well be scanner-based, and that's fine. but please. if you wish to sell bonsai models for art, please offer life and not death, volume two. jin and shari are fine, but come on.
yt,
j
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y, thanks wendy. i always worry a little bit if i feel like i'm the only one who's noticed. :/
the only time you could scan a living bonsai well and kindly, if you had a small scanner, would be when you were repotting the tree, and also pruning its roots so it would feel at home in yet another small enviroment.
i don't feel like that's what's happening here. and it may be a little crazy poet or whatever of me to say so, but--someone cared for those trees and tended them before they died. and i don't think that the people who're scanning them and selling them were the same people who tried to keep them alive.
i'm a garden persorn. so this troubles me. and i do not want to see dead bonsai volume 3.
don't walk into the garden if you don't care. even if you reckon that this is only a playground.
j
Yeah, seeing a dead Bonsai tree gives a feeling of sadness and loss. There is a Bonsai garden at the US National Arboreum in NE Washington, DC. that I visited several times. Seeing many fine 100+ year old trees no bigger than a (US) football is amazing. Then I saw the little grove of fully formed, perfectly proportioned, pine trees with the dead one sticking out like a sore thumb and it just felt sad.
What a responsibility. Nobody ever owns them. One just becomes their caretaker for a few decades.
However, one could also look at it like starving and torturing trees for centuries.
Long term sadism.
Even bonsai trees must eventually die. It is surprising that they live as long as they do, given the treatment that they receive. All trees have a limited lifespan, with many tree species living no longer than humans. It is the nature of things.
To begin with, they are nice models and while I wouldn't have minded some living ones to go with the dead ones that isn't really what makes me a tad confused. For me Bonsai trees has Always been miniature trees, yet these bonsai are shown next to human figures and Towers over those humans, and to me these trees are Not bonsai in all honesty. Having called them dead trees hadn't gotten me to react, but calling them bonsai just feels so wrong.
I think it is because they scanned actual dead bonsai trees to create the mesh
The product doesn't bother me in the slightest, but it did leave me puzzled for half a second there. I was surprised that there is a market for dead Bonzai trees, let alone a second set of them. Then it dawned on me that they're probably meant to be used as dead regular trees, for example in a fantasy or post apocalyptic setting. They're only called Bonzai because they're modelled after real life Bonzais. But yeah, it's (mildly) confusing.
they look really good to me
Bonsai of this complexity are several decades old. Given these are presumably 3D scans, it does mean that a lot of hard work and commitment ended up in the hands of someone who then didn't care for it. (I will however add that may not necessarily have been anyone on the Polygonal Miniatures team, but "Dead Bonsai" is certainly an odd want-ad).
It's not entirely unlike if someone had taken a gas torch to an E-type Jaguar or a Aston Martin DB5 in order to cut it up for an art project.
Trees with leaves will probably not go through the photogrammetry process well. I know they are photogrammetry products because of who the artist is. This product is in my wishlist, I can use it but only at the right price. I like them because they are REAL trees and will work great for various Photoshop composites.
I agree with earlier posters, Bonsai tree maintainance seems cruel, it never stops. I watched a master pluck and tweeze and pinch and snip and bind these trees. His groves were very nicely done, but after a while, I decided it was too much. So, the dead bonsai interested me, as their formation is not wasted. I'm going to try different foliage on them and see how they look as larger scale trees. I think those will be interesting.
As someone who has grown real miniature trees (I would never go as far as to claim them as being "bonsai"), those roots look super realistic... Too many times I've had miniature trees croak and was left with a woody corpse looking just like these models... those have to be scanned models... or that is an insanely dedicated level of sculpted detail.
That's what I thought at first... but most photogrammetry models don't look that good... especially the roots... a dead bonsai is small enough for a small scanner... but without seeing the actual mesh it's just a guess on my part.
they clean the mesh up in Zbrush, I remember seeing a post
every product that Polygonal Minaitures sells on Daz (and all the myriad of other marketplaces they sell products on) is photogrammetry scanned from real life objects.
They have lots of "live" bonsai trees on the "Mark Florquin" website. Maybe 'before' pictures and the dead ones are 'after' pictures.
I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I see a cetain beauty in the dead trees too, just like derelict buildings. There's something eerily beautiful about them....
Laurie