It’s been a while since I posted something (and in fact a while since I modelled anything) so I thought I’d get some practice in with a head built for sub-division. I watched Mr Bombs ‘Adrianna’ tutorial - which I found very helpful, and just got stuck in.
Progress isn’t as quick as I’d hoped, my topology knowledge is a bit rusty. I used a good ear tutorial from here before realising that Mr Bomb has done an excellent one specifically for blender. Ah well. Once you have a good ear - you can re-use it, so it’s worth the pain of modelling it.
There’s lots of tweaking to be done around the eyes and the ear - which hasn’t been adjusted for the model yet. I’m currently looking at neck topology and edge-flow, so any helpful ref there would be great.
Looking very good, I think the nose could be improved, especially the nostrils, many people just extrude straight hole, but shape of the nostrils are far more complicated (take a look in the mirror and you will see)
Some references (I’m sure you’ll find somthing useful there =):
Orinoco - Thanks! It’s not Adrianna, I used the tutorial more to get an idea of one approach to the subject. My refs are of a model called ‘Andrea’ from 3D.sk. Unfortunately it’s a pay site - so I can’t share the pics, but there are some free (and very useful) head and body refs here.
gustapo - Good call on the nose. The whole thing needs a ‘detail’ pass once all the elements are in place and I’m happy with the loop flow. Thanks for the topology ref - I had that thread bookmarked (along with Stahlberg’s female topology thread) a long time ago but lost it recently.
Some more progress. I can start to play with the verts/polies I have now. There’s a lot of tweaking to be done - the back of the head is a funny shape - it’s been extruded out but not adjusted yet. I’ve also got a bit of tidying to do there, I’m not happy with the distribution of polies. I might delete the back/sides of the head and ‘grow’ them out from the ear…
If she were bald with prosthetic eyes and wax skin - I’ve pretty much nailed it [jk]
Well, she’s initially just a head - which will hopefully encourage me to finish her, textures, hair and all. I might do shoulders to make her more of a traditional ‘bust’ sculpture. There may be a body in the future, but that’s a whole lot of work…
I just noticed that her neck is a lot more ‘fatty’ and less defined than I’ve modelled it, along with her cheeks which are also more fatty. I think I’ll tweak her in a perspective window using a couple of 3/4 images for ref, so that I can keep an eye on the various profiles and ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ on the face.
The head is looking quite good, although there’re a couple things that could using some tweaking.
1-The top of the head needs to come up a bit right in the middle, it’s a bit flat and short right now. The easiest way to make sure it’s proportional to the rest of the head is to remember that the eyes are exactly in the center of the head
2-The brow needs a little tweakng, as it is you’ve got it coming out from the eye and then just going straight up through the forehead, when in reality the brow is actually definitely defined, even if only slighty. If you select the bit of the loops that’s coming up from the nose and around to the brow and just pull it up and back a little, it’ll not only smooth the forehead out a little, but it’ll give the brow that little bit of definition it needs
3-The topology is really quite god, although the main thing I would note is that the loops that form the top of the head and that then continue on past the ear down to the neck should be continuous. So with just a little bit of reorganizing with the faces in that area and it’ll be great.
Hi mr_bomb,
Thanks for your observations! There are a few areas where I’ll change my edgeflow for the next model, including the nose side-crease and the eye inner-corner to the bridge of the nose. I could have done with another loop in there to help pull the brow out and smooth it round. The back of the head (as you pointed out) could use some better connection to the ear and neck, but I’m going to cover that area with hair and don’t plan to do any animation, so I’m going to leave it and use the time I have in other areas.
Anyway, I made progress in trying to lock down the likeness. I think I have a good ‘eye’ model somewhere on my HD, but it has Maya shaders attached (I used to be a Maya modeller) so I’ll have to get to grips with Blenders node editor.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison between the photographed head and my 3d head. Allowing for differences between the physical camera lens and Blender’s equivalent, I think I’m getting there… Still far from finished yet of course.
After looking at that comparison shot, I did the following:
1/ Softened the neck where it joins the ear / jaw.
2/ Moved the jawline down at the back.
3/ Moved the central brow ridge down and out.
4/ Pulled the chin forward.
5/ Deepened the filtrum crease (between nose and top lip).
6/ Fattened upper lip slightly.
7/ Softened some hard crease lines in the ear.
Below is the latest shot. Hopefully you’ll be able to see the differences. It really helped me when I closed my orthographic views and used just a perspective window and some good reference, tumbling the head to match the look of the photographs.
Just a bit of fun before I dive into particle hair. I did a quick UV projection of the face from the front ref image, and stuck in a pair of stock eyes I had, just to see how she’d look. The lashes are on the map - they’ll be done properly later.
Here’s the result with a basic skin shader applied, which is courtesy of The Renderin Kiwi.
If I want to apply lip and eye colour on a texture map, I’ll obviously need a masked texture which just affects those areas. Anyone know of a tutorial on how to integrate masked textures into a node-based shader?
While I figure out how to introduce textures to the skin shader, I’ve been having fun with alpha planes as eyelashes. I was going to use particles, but I can’t get fine enough control for eyelashes.
I had an issue where the shadow of the full geometry was showing on my renders (the shadow under the eye), as seen here:
Turns out (after a little head-scratching) that I’d forgotten to turn on ‘recieve transparent shadows’ in the skin shader… Now it’s fixed:
There is no colour around the eye yet - the skin on the eyelid will be darker where the mascara is. I’ve also noticed a ‘bump’ in my eye geometry which looks like a light ring around the iris - I’ll look into that…
sigh yours is better, even though I put in SO much more time on mine. Always learning. Great thread! Keep posting and we’ll have a great reference for the rest of us.
And so, we come to the UV unwrapping. I’ve done a fair bit of this - but it doesn’t get any easier (or doesn’t seem to). I tried LSCM and pinning, but ended up doing a front/side projection and stitching them together to get to this stage. There’s still a lot of adjusting to do. I want to produce quite a detailed bump map with pores and skin creases so this step has to be done right. The maps will be 2048 px square…
