A stone bust

How this was made

The model was lifted from a photograph by an AI tool called Meshy. The file held 110,000 points and 220,000 triangles and nothing else at all: no texture, no skeleton, no expressions. That is why it is lit here like a sculpture and not like a photograph.

What the AI got wrong

• There were no eyes. Instead of an eyeball, the eye was carved into the skin, the iris engraved as a shallow disc, and the two of them looked in different directions.
• The surface was noisy: 3,270 points stood off their neighbours, and shards of polygon floated along the hairline.
• The back was invented. Given one photograph from the front, the AI guesses the rest; here it came out bald and lumpy. We left it, because conjuring hair that was never there would be making things up.

What we did

• We cut the carved surface out of each socket and put a real ball there: sclera, iris and pupil. Each eye turns about its own centre, so it really turns in its socket.
• We smoothed selectively: a point was pulled in only in proportion to how far it stood out. The strands of hair stayed; the shards went.
• For the web we took 226,000 triangles down to 70,000 and compressed the file: 320 KB instead of 5.4 MB. Side by side you cannot tell them apart.

Model: the site owner's own work (Meshy). Repair and stage: tuncsystem.com. The 3D drawing happens in your browser with three.js; nothing is sent to a server.