Hi everyone, I’m fairly new to 3d and Blender though I’ve been an artist in other media for a long time. I sculpt in clay quite a bit so 3d was sort of a natural step for me. This is my first real model other than some of the beginning tutorials, like the gingerbread man on the blender wiki. I do plan to model a whole body for her, hopefully soon. Any critique is very welcome, thanks for taking a look.
Nice model & line flow. Cool, go on!
Niiiice 
Neck needs to be a bit thicker but it’s looking awesome!!
~Misfit
Thanks for the feedback 
I’ve done a little more work on her, slow going since I have a lot of other stuff going on. I’ve thickened the neck a little and added ears. No update picture yet, I’m on the world’s slowest dialup so I’m only going to upload major changes.
One thing I noticed is that you have quite a few triangles in your mesh. While triangle polys are not totally evil, they should be avoided when possible, especially if the area is likely to be animated. The subsurface algorithm has a hard time calculating around triangles and can cause artifacting when you try to animate your model. Also, the edge loops at the top of the head look off, meaning they do not run smoothly through that area. I can’t really see that part so it’s pretty hard to give more detailed advice on what to do there.
Like as has been stated, your model is coming along nicely. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the tips Soter, I’d heard about avoiding triangles and I tried to but I didn’t really know why before. Now that I do I think I’m going to be going on a triangle search and destroy mission.
I do have a question, in areas that won’t really be animated like the ears (where I know I have several triangles) and the very top of the head which will be covered with hair, how important is it to get rid of them there?
If it’s not going to be visible and it’s not going to be deformed, it’s not a particularly huge deal. However, if you’re modeling and using subdivision surfaces, trying to avoid tri’s will work to your benefit. Subsurfs work better when you use quads.
So for the top of the head (unless she’s going to be bald) it’s not a big deal. For the ear… depending on where the tri’s are located, it may or may not be important.
Since you scuplt in the clay, I was wondering if you start with a sphere(ico/uv) and pull the points around, or from scratch, one vertice at a time? … or with a nurbs curve(s) ?
Mike
One other note on modelling:
The more severely a polygon is stretched (whether quad or tri) the harder it is to deform and texture properly. Not a big deal if not being deformed, still a big deal for texturing. Hopefully that makes sense as I’m feeling too tired to go explain it in any more detail than that right now. It’s something to keep in mind so that you don’t have problems further in the modelling process.
Fweeb, Soter: Thanks for the explanations, I think I’m getting the point.
mstram: For the head I used the method from the Better Face tutorial thread. I was trying to follow a couple reference sketches that I drew, so that method made a lot of sense to me, I suppose if I were to be modeling this like I sculpt which is spontaneosly then I would probably start with a sphere. I just started the torso tonight and for that since I have a pretty good mental picture of what I want I started with a cylinder and I’m working from there.
In case anyone is curious these are my sketches, I don’t think I matched it well at all which I think is for the best since I think the model is better looking http://members.lycos.co.uk/diona/stuff/headref.jpg
Thanks, I’ll take a look at it.
Mike
Okay some progress coming along, ears, got rid of as many triangle as I could figure out how to get rid of (I think there is only one on each ear now), and the beginnings of a body.
Looks really good, as even she as a little too much Sinnaed O’Conner style 
. I think, the ears seem to be a bit off the face, I think, they should be a little more to the front.
Hehe, I’m hoping she’ll have hair soon to get rid of the baldness, I’m still reading up on creating hair and playing around with some on a sphere. Hopefully she’ll have some cute hair soon.
I’m not sure the ears are too far back, I’ll shift them around a bit and see if it looks better though.
looking good.
Though, you might want to rethink your shoulder topology early on.
Also, I checked out your sculpts thread, cool stuff. 
So I guess I know what to expect proportions/style wise.
So far, I’d say ya on the right track.
keep it up.
Hey Noadi,
You are doing great! A long time ago I also started as a newbie in blender and also a girl as a first project, which is still ongoing. It is going slowly, but that because I like to improve things all the time. Maybe you can benefit from my thread… so here is my Elissa thread:
I started in “Work in progress”
the link to the old WIP post :
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=43505
and now still continueing in the “Focused critique” forum:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=58566&highlight=elissa
For the complete you have to look at the very first page till the end in te Focused critique forum, because it changed a lot when tim epassed by…
So I spent part of my day today (granted not much because it was 70+ degrees and this is Maine in Spring that doesn’t happen much) figuring out particle hair to give my girl. Big thanks to Brian H and sketchy’s fur threads, they were both a big help. I haven’t added the hair yet to my girl this is just on a ball, so I thought I’d ask for some feedback on it first. I tried to give it a material that would mimic natural highlights I hope I succeeded.
Edit: almost forgot the rest of what I was going to write.
the_nr: yeah the shoulders need work but the body is still very early stages I have tons of stuff yet to refine.
Wim: thanks for the links, they helped me so I know some problems to look out for and how to fix them.
Okay, an update. Got the body and head attached, more detail on the body finished. No progress on the hair, I like what I had from the test but I haven’t gotten the hang of curve guides yet.
Proportions of limbs to body looks a bit weird to me.
Aligorith
Yeah, it’s one of those things where if you take a break and come back the next day it’s easy to see the problems. Her body from the waist to crotch area is too long, her arms I think are a little short but until I add hands it’s hard to tell by how much, and I think her arms and legs both are a little too thin. I guess I have a lot of work to do today
On the positive side, I didn’t mention before but I rendered it with YafRay this time and I really like the soft lighting I got. Also YafRay solved one problem I was having, since Blender’s internal renderer renders on screen I was having trouble with it crashing and doing other strange things. YafRay takes longer but since it doesn’t have to render on screen it didn’t make my poor old slow computer freak out.
