This is my first 3d portrait in blender. It is meant to be angelina Jolie, however - it looks like a man (and quite an ugly man at that). At least it loos like a person though - which is better than my figure models.
How do I achieve a likenss, if these techniques relate to 2d work - even better.
Thank you.
Most female models look like men until you texture and add hair. I can see the likeness peeking through. It’s looking really good, keep going. A few odd loops, but overall solid. You should enabled clipping on the mirror modifier.
One trick I’ll do sometimes is to add another scalp object, add a hair system, small numbers ~300-400 comb it roughly. The importance of hair is often overlooked, and it can greatly affect the proportions and instant appearance of masculine/feminine qualities. It’s somewhat more important in sculpting than modeling from a reference sheet. But adding some quick hair will immediately give the model a much more female feel.
I recommend switching to perspective mode and modeling (or better yet, sculpting) by eye. Achieving a realistic likeness in ortographic mode is pretty much impossible, especially since the reference picture itself has depth.
It’s also useful if you have the exact specifications of the camera the picture was taken with so you can adjust the camera settings to match it as much as possible. This is very tough to find most of the time, and maybe not worth the effort. Just playing around with the focal length (in the camera settings for the render or in the ‘properties’ panel (N key) for the viewport) is usually good enough for me 
Here are two cg-cookie tutorials on the topic, in case you haven’t seen those yet (the second one needs a subscription):
(this one is rendered in Blender Internal, fyi)
I have restarted. This one i feel is better. However it still looks off. How do I fix the slight errors in form (and topology).
Thank you
Remember that as you shape the head the hair on the reference is raised up off the scalp. You could try to sketch in the shape of the scalp on a copy of the reference image to help you.
(I don’t know for sure it’s the same in 3D modelling, but anyway: )
In school I had to draw a lot of portraits on paper. It is true that the haircut is a huge factor in making a person recognizable. If I quickly drew some hair there was indeed a resemblance to the model, however if I ignored the hair the rest of the drawing didn’t look like the person much (because I had already made clear who it was just with the hair and some basic lines on the face). I think it might be better to leave the hair out until you have a clear resemblance with the “bald” drawing (or mesh in this case).
