THE BODY AT HEART AND CREAFORM COLLABORATION

Cynthia Coulombe Bégin is a renowned Quebec painter who began her professional career in 2006 by paying homage to the aesthetics of the human body. Her first exhibition, Traces Corporales, was held at the Musée Marius-Barbeau and was acclaimed by local art critics. Over the past few decades, she has exhibited in galleries, private companies, and group events in Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, New York, London, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Her works have also been published in regional and national publications.

Her most recent exhibition, Le Corps à Cœur, took place in 2021 at the Corno X Beauchamp gallery in Montreal. She was the first solo artist to hold an exhibition there following the death of renowned Canadian artist Corno, a pseudonym of Joanne Corneau, in 2016.

Body to Heart is CCB's sculptural exploration of body image and self-acceptance. To achieve this, she used 3D scans of her own body to create stunning statuettes using a 3D scanner. Go!SCAN SPARK from Creaform and VXmodel scan-to-CAD software module.

CCB's body scanning process took place at Creaform's offices in Lévis and lasted approximately 4 hours. Data acquisition was performed at a resolution of 1.00 mm. Although the 3D scanning only took 2 to 3 minutes for each pose, CCB took the same pose multiple times to ensure sufficient data was acquired for post-processing.

Due to the model's micromovements (due to breathing and difficult positions to hold for a long time), the 3D scanner operator only scanned all required body parts once for each pose; this prevented capturing the tiny changes in the model's position during the pose. To further assist, the software was set to semi-rigid object mode, which increases accuracy on subjects that deform slightly during acquisition. For some poses, supports were used so that the model's body parts did not move during data acquisition.

To complete this artistic project, various VXmodel tools were used to correct micro-movements and improve surfacing. Post-processing of all models took place over a period of 3 to 4 days. After that, all that was left was to 3D print the models and let the artist express their creativity by adding colors and textures. In total, around thirty works of art were created.