I am working on this project 100% freehand, not using any references what-so-ever, and I am requesting feedback on the realism of this character, how bad does it look (Please be honest, I can take criticism)
The points I am interested in the most are:
How feminine does the character look (please do remember that characters look incredibly different without eyebrows, eyelashes and hair)
Is there any part of the character that looks unnatural? If so can you specify what or is it just that something seems off? (Ignore the eyes, they’re placeholders)
although any criticism is greatly appreciated
Oh, more WIP renders (quite a few that are older) can be found on my DeviantART gallery (scraps), I use the same username there.
The mesh looks really solid, as though the polys are well formed. What we see here is really strangely tall/long. I don’t know if that’s an effect of screen resolutions or what, but could you scrunch it down to the “two squares” height?
Though not every face is the same, I wonder most about the mouth. The outsides seem too far forward or puffed out. I wonder if softly pulling the nose and bridge out one more of its own depth might help. It’s nearly feminine but I would experiment with making the lips fuller too.
Thank you for the feedback, I am currently investigating the strangely tall, as I see it now it is probably the resolution or render settings but I’ll experiment a bit (from the very lowest vertex to the topmost vertex it’s three squares, the head alone is exactly two squares tall (and the scale looks about right when I reference it to a photo of someone who is 158cm tall (the height of the character I am making))
For the width of the head it’s 1.5 squares.
these measurements are with the default grid in blender (lines 16, scale 1, subdivisions (greyed out) 10)
for the faces, firstly I thank you for noticing that I take good care of the topology
Secondly, no, every face isn’t the same but I try to keep them fairly close where possible and I try to keep as many of them as possible to be square (silly diamond quads)
For the mouth, that is actually my primary concern, this would be my fourth attempt and it’s looking kind of ok for a WIP imo, although I really can’t figure out how to make the lips without a reference (and I am not intending to start using a reference just for this)
I’ll experiment a bit with pulling the nose and bridge out a bit to see if that helps, I’ll also see what I can do about the mouth, your input might just help me fix it
Again, thank you, here are some of the experiments (I’ll experiment a bit more later)
video youtube(dot)com /watch?v=KPTBV7Mnvc0 (Turntable animation showing all angles)
I love optics and I’ve been ‘making faces’ as an experiment too. Something occurred to me as I work on my own no-reference meshes: Blender’s Field of View. It changes. Sometimes it’s a wide angle and sometimes it’s a 50mm equivalent on a 35mm lens camera. This distortion has caused me grief but when we Rigify a character, the skeletal system is 2 Blender Units tall. 2BU is about 6-feet tall in the context of the lighting, the physics and other magnificence of Blender. With your careful work, are you switched to Metrics to eliminate guesswork?
So I wonder if that also applies to the lens on the perspective viewport? I know that everything should Scale perfectly, but light (and water) and the aperture of the perspective view “camera” don’t. In short, are these renders through a camera you can control or cropped screenshot of the working space in Blender? There’s a pixel aspect ratio that you can control to correct or compensate for that stretching if you render.
In other curiosities, I have never formed a good set of lips WITHOUT merging many vertices at the corners. It feels counter productive but it stops the ‘rectangle-look’ at the corners and I’ve been able to create many good expressions. Some vertices have been 8-pointed stars and not distorted the lips or cheeks. (That old open mouth is the only example I’ve got at the moment showing that there’s no vertex puckering - it’s not a good set of lips!)
I’ll hush up now and just enjoy your coming progress!
I love optics and I’ve been ‘making faces’ as an experiment too. Something occurred to me as I work on my own no-reference meshes: Blender’s Field of View. It changes. Sometimes it’s a wide angle and sometimes it’s a 50mm equivalent on a 35mm lens camera. This distortion has caused me grief but when we Rigify a character, the skeletal system is 2 Blender Units tall. 2BU is about 6-feet tall in the context of the lighting, the physics and other magnificence of Blender. With your careful work, are you switched to Metrics to eliminate guesswork?
The FOV changes? Well, maybe between versions, although I haven’t noticed since I saved my render settings to the default scene (with a few other tweaks of mine to make sure it is a consistent experience)
And yes, I did switch to metric (How else would I be able to make a character that is exactly 158cm tall?), it is as a matter of fact one of the little tweaks I mentioned above
So I wonder if that also applies to the lens on the perspective viewport? I know that everything should Scale perfectly, but light (and water) and the aperture of the perspective view “camera” don’t. In short, are these renders through a camera you can control or cropped screenshot of the working space in Blender? There’s a pixel aspect ratio that you can control to correct or compensate for that stretching if you render.
Yes, I am fairly certain it applies to the lens in the perspective viewport (I am only rarely in ortho and that’s only for extreme close-ups)
The renders are through the default blender camera, just somewhat tweaked (see attached screenshot)
In other curiosities, I have never formed a good set of lips WITHOUT merging many vertices at the corners. It feels counter productive but it stops the ‘rectangle-look’ at the corners and I’ve been able to create many good expressions. Some vertices have been 8-pointed stars and not distorted the lips or cheeks. (That old open mouth is the only example I’ve got at the moment showing that there’s no vertex puckering - it’s not a good set of lips!)
Really? I just couldn’t do that, I couldn’t do such a thing to my carefully laid out topology ^^; (Now I am not sure how that actually relates to whether or not I made good lips or not, but hey it was interesting so it doesn’t matter :3)
Nice render btw.
^^; You’re flattering me (I actually spent a lot of time on the ear, not quite happy with it yet but I’m getting there)
Well, since it looks feminine I can confidently move on to making the body (I always “finish” one part first, there’s still tweaking to do but meh)
The sidebar is quite easy, open a new panel, set it to file manager and set the display mode to this one see attached screenshot
Now, if you are using reference images or a lot of textures it’s even more convenient, you can just drag and drop (on background for reference images on object for textures) them instead of using the normal open dialog, and they end up where you dropped them (meaning you can get fairly exact reference placement without issues)
I generally prefer just looking at a picture for reference, I find reference-less modeling a lot more rewarding (due to the vastly increased challenge involved)
