Modeling on the face looks pretty good. I’m not really sure what the problem your having with the mouth is. It’s a bit small, but you’re not going for realism. Seems a perfectly good stylized mouth to me.
The side view, on the other hand, shows some deficiencies.
try to get a loop (red) running along the forhead down in front of the ear and following the jaw. That should help with the chin and the neck modeling. The back of the skull (yellow) has edges radiating from the ear. The neck (blue) is a bit more complex: the throat runs backwards from the mouth, two muscles run from the skull just behind the ear to the notch between the clavicles, and the back of the neck is defined by the muscles attached to the skull. My recommendation for the skull and neck is to get a side view background reference photo or drawing.
Mr. Bomb has an excellent video tutorial on making ears, which I’m sure you noticed were missing.
For a few hours work, you’ve got a nice head going. If you haven’t made an ear before, it will probably take just as long, the first time. It gets quicker with practice.
Perspective does what it does. In camera view, you can play around with the distance to the camera and the lens size to get different looks.
There are still some proportions flaw on this head. That’s why you have some weird behaviour.
The fact that the head appear “slimmer” in perspective might have two causes :
camera (default lense create such deformation on close up shots)
head (back of the skull might not be wide enough)
I think it might be a mix of the two…
As for the eyes, you might consider :
enlarging the eyes (correct some proportion flaws but gives a more cartoony look)
diminishing the distance between each eyes
Topology is okay but could use some improvement. Add loops around the eyelid region and the mouth…
Orinoco is right about the proposed mods, proposed mods will make it easier for you to add features like ears and stuffs…
So…
Mouth still looks like two bits of putty pasted on a flatface.
Try reworking the mesh around the corner of the lips… Try pulling some vertices inside the mouth…
Try to do some basic eyelids. If you modeled the mouth, the eyelids are as easy to do and will enhance the overall look of the face…
Remember :
Even if you don’t aim at realism, people will still base on what they know to judge your work. Caricature and cartoons are just exageration of realism. If you want to make a stylized human, you still have to cope with human likeness
The main thing, as Orinoco pointed out, is your current edgeflow. Just follow the paint-over he kindly posted and you should be off to a great start! As for the shape of the mesh, since it’s stylized it’s fine for the most part how it is, although one thing that I’d suggest is to add a few more loops around the eye and give definite shape to and eyelid and a nice solid brow. It will give the model much for ‘depth’ and give you more control of detail. The nose is also quite skinny, maybe make it a bit wider, particularly the nostrils.
The skull worked out fairly well, though I still need to do a bit of shaping and the radial edges are a bit bent.
I’m not quite sure about the way I got the jawline loop, as it puts a lot of edges between the mouth and the chin and changed the width of the face a lot.
Eyes are slightly larger and closer together. It looks very slightly cross-eyed though, so I’ll have to fix that.
I’ve also done a bit of work with the nose, though I’m not quite sure whether it looks good yet.
I haven’t done much work with the eyelids, mouth or neck yet. I still don’t get what the blue lines in Orinoco’s overlay were supposed to mean, so clarification there would be nice.
Sorry about the long delay in getting back to you. Here’s some illustrations of the neck:
Notice the muscle/tendons running from just behind the ear to the notch between the clavicles. The other form in front of the neck is the throat, which runs from the back of the mouth (inside) into the torso.
The first photo second row shows the throat curving toward the center of the neck, while the muscles angle toward the front of the neck.
All these ladies have their heads tilted and turned to make the neck forms very visible, in a looking straight ahead pose the forms don’t pop out quite so much, and in some people (not so slender) the forms can be very hard to spot. The neck is so much more than a simple cylinder, and arranging your edges to follow the lines of a real neck will allow you to model these forms. Also, when you start modeling the shoulders, you’ll already have the connecting loops in the right place.
I think I get what you’re saying, though I’m having trouble thinking of how it’ll convert to topography. I’ll try a few things and show another update in a few days. Or a few weeks. Or whenever I get around to it, really.
An update in five days. Not bad, considering how slow I usually am.
I didn’t actually change the edge loops much to get the neck things. It was mostly vertex pushing edge sliding and such. Either getting the neck right is really easy, or I completely misunderstood what you were trying to say.
Please let me know if I’ve done anything entirely wrong.
I think I still need to work on the back of the neck, so any help there would be nice too.
when the edge loops are good, getting correct form is easy. From what you’ve got so far, the neck is looking alright. It gets a bit more involved as you extend the neck down to the torso and make all the connections to the shoulders, but you have a good base.
I think you went overboard some with the loops across the forehead and around the chin: you’ve got five of them, two would have been plenty. I’d have put more loops around the eyes as mr_bomb suggested. (pay close attention when mr_bomb talks about organic modeling: he’s good.) The nose width is better, but the nostrils are still too narrow. And you’ve got what’s called a “roman” nose going: no depression between the eyes, just a straight shot to the forehead.
Regards the back of the neck/head, download the skull from Grey’s Anatomy to use for a background reference to get the shape of the back of the skull. Once the skull has a good shape, I’d wait on any more work on the neck until the eyes and ears were more complete. Realistically, the neck depends on attachments to the skull and to the shoulder girdle: with no shoulders, it’s tough to say whether the shapes are correct or not.
Woah, I haven’t updated this for a while. So much for work ethic.
Anyways, I’ve made a number of changes since the last update. Most notably, I’ve added some more stuff around the eye, though I’m keeping the unrealistically huge eyes as a stylization, and I’ve done the ears by following Mr.Bomb’s tutorial. There’s also been some tweaks to the topography and shape. Some of the stuff I can’t even remember, since I did some of it way back in September.
And a close up of the ear.
The ears need some tweaking. Especially in front view (They look a bit too elfish). If there’s something terribly wrong with them, I’d like to know now, so I won’t have to do as much work to go back and fix them.
I keep changing the size of the nose. I think I’d like it to be smaller than normal, for style reasons, but I’m not absolutely certain on that and when I make it too small it starts looking ridiculous.
Well, I’m not really planning on developing this into a character anyway. I want to get the feel for head modelling before I start working on whole characters. I’m thinking I’ll do one or two more head models before starting to work on bodies.
So yeah, if there’s only a few minor crits left, I think I’ll move on and call this one done.
There are still some proportions flaw on this head. That’s why you have some weird behaviour.
