I had a botched attempt at one which you can all see in the “other software” forum, turned out kind of hilarious…Anyway, I started with 3D stuff pretty much a week and a half ago so this is all pretty new…I did two furniture scenes to start out with 3D, then I found out about Sculptris which is a pretty amazing program. Very relaxing and artsy feeling to use it.
Anyway, I’ve been working on this head for a little while. I started out with the basic sphere and did it all in Sculptris, though I’ve heard it can be better to do the basic, low-polygon modeling in Blender first, which is interesting, but I don’t 100% understand the benefit. After a little while I had something like this:
After some further fiddling I had this:
which looked kind of good, but pretty much only from the side. From the front it kind of looked like a monster or fetus…
It took me a long time to get the head to stop looking scary until I took a picture of the profile and put it in photoshop, trying to draw on top of it… I realized it had something to do with the eyes, that they were too close together. So I attempted to fix that, tried to fix everything up in general a little and reduce brushed all the really dense areas (good idea yes/no? Seems like it makes sense, though I guess it ties into some of my later questions) added some hair (was really difficult to make anything passable even in this semi-cartoonish style, not sure what I should be doing there)
I think it turned out kind of cool, but I’m fine with hearing whatever criticisms you guys have. I’m interested in maybe trying to rig it as an exercise in facial stuff, it it’s compatible. I know some stuff about how animation works and how to build a skeleton for the body but I don’t really understand what shape keys are or in general how to rig a face. I will try to watch a few youtube videos about this subject.
Two views with some fun materials in Blender/cycles:
The two major questions that arose throughout me doing this are: how do you model eyelids? I felt like nothing I could do looked like an actual eyelid. Although I did come up with some stuff that made him look like he had conjunctivitis, but that’s beside the point…anyway, I tried grabbing the area above the eye socket and dragging it down, and a few other things…is this maybe one of the things that’s easier to do low poly first in blender?
Secondly is the mouth actually done as a pocket/depression in the face, or actually a hole/absence of faces? The former is what I did here instinctively. If you’re going to animate it, I guess do you put separate tooth/gum/tongue objects inside? And I guess a mouth lining mesh or something?
As an aside, I need to learn more about UV maps, bump maps, normal maps, and a bunch of other terminology. I have been mostly watching video tutorials and haven’t found an understandable process and definition for these, if any of you know of something like that. Right now I only have a vague sense of what any of them even are. Links for any of the topics I’m asking about are fine, I’m just not 100% sure where to look or what’s the best explanation.
Also, What do you do if you need different parts of the same object to have different materials? Should you just always aim for separate objects all parented to the main mesh if you need different materials? Are ‘specular maps’ kind of related to this?
Answers on any of these questions and/or comments on the model are greatly appreciated. Basically if you have a particularly good tutorial on some of my more general questions it’d be nice for you to post it otherwise I will try to look some more on my own. I am finding 3D extremely fun and satisfying. Thanks, everyone here seems really helpful so far! Sorry for asking so much.