Human proportions (nudity)

This is my eternal WIP about humans.

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the 8 head proportions, it is not super realistic, because I think 7 and 1/2 is more realistic, but it is close enough and much easy to do:






Some variations, once you get the proportions right it is easy to just go whateber you want.
Strong, or fat, that’s not mater




More variations, and Children.
Children change all the proportions, yo got more head and less body, so the overall body can go from 3 heads, and going up, until 8 heads in the adult.
Skinny or anorexic is just taking out mas and showing the bonds out.




the 8 head proportions, it is not super realistic, because I think 7 and 1/2 is more realistic, but it is close enough and much easy to do:

You are exactly right but many years ago illustrators went to the eight headed figure for a more elegant look. While fashion illustrators found nine heads more to their liking. You really seem to have this down and it’s looking very nice.

Back in the very long ago, before computers (gasp!), when we had to fight off T-rex on the way to work ;), eight heads was the ideal male height, 7-1/2 the female ideal, so that’s a good starting point, Tona.

Thanks, Yes, 9 it is to distorted for my eyes, and 8 it is a lot easier than the rest, so I think for a “beginner” like me it is ok.
Anyhow I think you can be flexible enough, because human variations are the normal, I study anatomy for many year for my profession (physiotherapist), and now I also teach anatomy, and I had seen a lot of variations, but they are shuttle in the big picture of proportions.

Hahaha Nice picture! Thanks, I’ll try male later.

Face children proportion 7 year more or less. (orthographic view obviously)


It’s so good to see someone working in orthographic mode to get a clear view of the model and no distortions from the default 35 mm lens :slight_smile: The proportions of the child’s head are great and very convincing. Maybe the forehead is bulged out a little too much.

You are right!
I use orthographic view, or 80, 90 mm lens y don’t feel like my eyes see like a 35…
And I think you are right about the forehead!
Thanks!

This is actually an extremely bad work flow and it is why you routinely see people on Blender artist sculpt heads with craniums that are too small and with all sorts of proportion errors. The better way is to set the lens to something about 80mm or so and to turn and look at you model from many angles as possible stay out of orthographic views for organics.

Tonatiuh, of course when you get the eight headed figure down you can modify it at will. A large, short, elderly man is not going to be eight or even seven heads high. I hate to tell you guys but we actually lose height in the damn aging process.

I couldn’t agree more with the default 35mm comments here. And, tyrant monkey your comment seems to make sense in that you would need the proportions with a real lens but at a given distance. Now if I can organics aside for a moment. The default 35mm can render some unreal results even in archviz. A door eight (8) feet behind a desk can look like it’s twenty five (25) feet behind it. In a photograph we just simply accept that with no question. But, in CG it sometimes doesn’t seem to fly.

That being said the 50mm lens has often been called boring in photography. Maybe that is why our default lens is 35mm as it is in most every 3d program I believe. Sorry to get off topic but this default lens thing has been bugging me for several years.

You can see also in draws, many small cranium, I don’t think the problem is in the lens, (it helps) but people tend to look to the faces, and forget the cranium. orthographic… 80 mm… it does not mater, every person that is starting with faces an heads, draw small craniums.
But if you are getting the proportions an measuring, I think in orthographic it is a very good way, but you have to be aware, that the ears, are going to pop out, and the cranium is going to look big. If you see the proportions I did, to my sculpt of a child, yo have to admit that it wouldn’t work in other view than orthographic.

Hm, the difference between orthographic mode and 80 to 120 mm lenses is smaller than the difference between orthographic mode and the default 35 mm lens. So i wouldn’t consider orthographic mode and user ortho as an extremely bad workflow. In fact I think it’s the default 35 mm lens, which is the reason for the many distortions that we see. And I don’t see the point in making a difference between organic shapes and non organic shapes. Camera distortions occur under both conditions.

You are right, that for renders of portraits a longer focal length should be used. But, don’t we do that because we want to get as close to an orthographic view as we could? Maybe I misunderstood the way orthographic mode is working, though.

Edit: Tonatiuh, you were faster than me :slight_smile:

You are not off topic at all, this was a night mare for me at the beginning, with blender (I never use other 3D programs) if you can not see properly, how are you going to draw or sculpt properly? Then I realize that it was looking thru a 35 mm lens!!! so then I put a 80 or 90 mm and start seen the light hehe. Then I discover the orthographic-view, and it helps a lot to just block the proportions like if you were just studying the human form, like when you draw, real measure every were! But the thing is in 3D you have to be aware of the lens all the time!

And yes, yes, elderly people tend to shrink a little (some more than other, it depends much in the muscle mas, sedentary or very unfit people shrink the most), but not the face or the nose or the ears, or the hands or feet.

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Back to the basics!!!
I decided to use a low-poly mesh for my sculpts, so I took Andrew Loomis book and start to study everything again from the very beginning.
Here it is the ideal proportions of a male as Andrew Loomis. The pose he did, and the semyTpose, for rigify. with no subdivisions, and with one subdivision:

Render with the wire-frame node in cycles


Low-poly no subdivisions


Low-poly one subdivision


I never did such a low-poly modeling, it is fun to do it!

Here is the reference from the book and some detail:





Female WIP (Loomis liked really tall females!)

Re: Wide angle, long lenses and orthographic views – The main difference between ANY camera lens designation except perhaps extreme telephoto (say 300mm+) is that ortho views show absolutely no perspective convergence, while any lens shows at least some. In long lenses (say 80mm and above), the perspective is flattened somewhat, but not eliminated entirely. The principal reason longer lenses are used for portrait photography is not because they look more like ortho views, but because they better portray facial proportions as they are perceived by the human eye/brain combination. Wider angle (shorter) lenses have more pronounced perspective effects, so foreground objects appear proportionally larger than with longer lenses covering a similar field of view. In portraits, the nose is a foreground object and wider lenses make it look too large in relation to other features. The same perspective considerations broaden the face and produce other less desirable visual effects.

But an ortho view is just as distorted because there is NO perspective, so items farther from the camera do not diminish in size. Our eyes do perceive perspective so ortho views look odd and distorted, particularly when the extremities are viewed close to the camera and the rest of the body farther away – the expected perspective size difference is missing and make the proportions look completely bonkers.

Early large-format cameras did not have this problem of lens choice as seriously as more modern smaller-format (like 35mm) film cameras. Lenses were generally fixed and seldom interchangeable. But progress made for smaller cameras and more portability, and eventually different lens choices. This introduced other factors in producing recorded visual images. The smaller the exposed film plane in a camera, the more perspective effects, and thus lens choice, affect the image outcome. For the very common 35mm SLR film camera, it quickly became a common “standard” to say a 50mm lens is a “normal” lens, but for a large format camera, 50mm focal length is fairly wide angle, and for small digital sensors, it’s considered a long lens. With digital cameras, small sensors can produce pronounced perspective effects. So beyond mere focal length, the area of exposed film/sensor comes into play when determining the best lens for a particular job.

For figurative work, when it’s important to portray the body’s proportions without undue distortion, a longer lens is a good idea. I often use an 80mm setting for 1080p rendering in Blender. But wider lenses can be more dramatic because of their more pronounced perspective effects, whereas a longer lens can look more “documentarian” and “reportorial” because of the flattened perspective they portray. All of this is a matter of human perception, so studying that is also helpful when working in a field where lens choice is another tool of the trade.

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