This model will eventually turn into three characters for an animated folk tale: either the evil stepmother and her two evil stepdaughters, or the title character and her mother and the old witch.
Nice model, though there are some tris and poles. The faceloops look good around a lot of the face, though the forehead and edges of the face seem slightly pinched.
The skin around the eyes just ends, it would be nice if she had some eyelids, and some definition. This would give a lot of expression to the face, and make it look more human than doll. Look at some pictures of skulls, the forehead ends in the eye sockets quite abruptly.
I look forward to seeing more of this, looks very good so far.
Perhaps you might want to play with the sculpting tools (though they are in no way ready for production use, so just bear that in mind!) when you are making the specific characters. The B-sculpt script would work too.
IanC, thank you for that great resource! I see I’ve got a lot of work to do in the forehead area. I want these women to have expressive eyebrows. I’m going to put off working on details like eyelids until I get the basic shape and edge loops down.
I’ve got rid of all the tris, well, all except one behind each ear, just a tiny one. Nobody knows its there but me. But I’m not entirely sure how to get rid of poles, or if its even possible.
Regarding the eye sockets: you’re saying the slope from the brow to the eyeball is not steep enough? I’ll try that. I’m not satisfied with that area either.
Spent the morning adjusting face loops to match the drawing mentioned by IanC. Great resource. Props to the Brazilian Blender community, where I think it comes from. I made a small excerpt to use as a background image, shown below. But take a look at the whole thing, there’s a lot of good info there.
HI Orinoco, you’re doing great. The ear should be done better and made a little large.
The ear should start at the height of the eyebrows and the bottom should end at the same height as the nose ends:
Here’s a link from fineart.sk > a picture from Loomis anatomy books
but the size matched the ear reference I was using. Different photo from the head reference, though, because in that one the ear was covered by the model’s hair. Guess I didn’t match the skull size as closely as I thought I did.
Weekend is over, I start a 3 week math institute tomorrow, so my Blending time will be seriously curtailed. These ears look a lot better, IMHO, and are closer to the right size.
I think I’m going to start working on the body. I know the head needs a lot more work, especially around the eyes, but I think it’s at a point that I can get back to it later. (And I’m sure if I forget somebody here will remind me!) I don’t want to spend what little time I’ll have for the next few weeks just tweaking and detailing.
So, if anyone knows of any good resources for planning an animatable body, I’m all ears. Or eyes. Whatever.
I’d suggest more references too. Don’t rely on the male face to much because its much more angular. Do you have a 3d.sk account? I’d highly suggest that for women references you will need them.
Yeah start forming the torso now, but also fix that protruding forhead! The bones around the eye need to be softened a lot, and you seem to know what to do about detailing later. How come your not use sub-d’s and the mirror modifier right now? Is this a game character?
I am using the mirror and subdivisions level 2. I go back and forth on mirroring, a couple of posts back I realized the mirror to get rid of the seam, then later on I cut the head in half and remirrored it because the modifications on the left side looked better than the modifications on the right.
Seems like every time I do any work on the mesh, I also push the brow line back a little and soften it up a bit. Needs some more? Ok. All my background image references have been women, but the image I started with was a girl with a really high forehead, and I guess what caused the pronounced brow ridge was my not being able to visualize the curve around the corner from just looking at front and side views.
I don’t have an 3d.sk account, but I do stop by there and pick up their free stuff.
Creating a female face isn’t that easy. While doing my project I noticed it can be very difficult and it could start looking like a male far too quikcly. As Womball said, you’ll need a lot of references.
I’d start by collecting a lot of pictures and try to look what the definition of a female face and beaty is. keywords are, round ‘shapes’ and ‘soft’
I know anatomy won’t be a problem, because you helped me a lot.
Keep up the good work for the torso.
About the ear: it is much better good job! The connection of the ear to the head could be more smooth, because I notice a dip right in front of the ear.
It was late, I was tired, I had a big day coming up. I will fix the attachment of the ear. There’s also a couple of tris that got introduced which I still need to track down and eliminate.
for the image in post #8. I thought I saved it before I made the images. I guess not. No more working past my bedtime:mad: . Fortunately I didn’t loose the new ear. So: new ear, attached better than last time, softer jaw line (less squared off), softer cheeks under the eyes, shifted forehead back a bit to help soften the brow ridge. I also moved the nose up a bit, but am considering moving it back, or adjusting the mouth somehow. Maybe move the mouth up, too? Here’s the update
Even though the eyes can and usually will be pretty deep, they don’t need to be in pits. (upper eyelid)
Anyway, your main problem is that you don’t get the roundness, but rather flat face. Probably because you model it mainly from the front, but if you run your fingers across your face, you’ll realize it’s really more round than flat…
Hi Orinoco, here are some pointer I made, and I also put a reference next to you model. I’m not an expert, but it is just what I learned over the last months:
Hey, too bad hearing about you losing work done. It happened to me too once… it really sucks.
I tried a shortcut: applied a lattice to the head mesh, then tweaked the lattice. I moved the mouth area out a bit, and the forehead back a bit (actually the whole upper skull, and rotated it slightly. Then I spent some time on details: around the eyes, the nose, the lips, the chin area, moved the ear forward, smoothed out some spots where the loops got crooked. Photobucket is down for maintenance, I’ll post images in a few hours.
Most of the major changes were made just pushing verts around, but it looks like I’ll have to add some more lines to soften the transition from the front to the side of the face. I want to make the transition rounder, without making the cheek balloon out. The chin seems to be a little too pointy, too.
It is looking better, but still needs a lot of work… keep it up!
I do not have time to post a lot, but the eye area still needs some work. You have to let the loops start from the middle of the eye. It looks like you start from the bottom of the eye.
I tried to draw what I mean, but I had to be quick. Also there’s a ref image that somebody also showed me along my path while creating Elissa:
I also think the forehead is now too far heading toward the back…
You are right, you may need a few more line to get things a little more round.
Try to look for references as the above, to see how other artists have there female face loops.
Hope this helps.
(I’m not an expert, but if you want to see how I struggled, then go to my thread, to the first post and click the link to my old WIP thread… go through the pages one by one - you’ll see my question also how I could make my model to look more female)
I finally had a spare hour and a working laptop, so I fixed some of the most glaring things people have pointed out. Worked on the eyes, forehead, lips. Jessethemid, I tried switching mirror and subsurface in the stack, but it didn’t seem to matter which was on top. Wim, I’d been following your work in Focused Critique, but I had no idea how much work you’d already done in WIP. Wow. Now I’m even more impressed. Anyway, here’s the update:
I found a site called Marquardt Beauty Analysis while browsing another thread, and they claim to have analyzed beauty, based on the old greek “golden mean.” I’ve compared my model’s landmarks with their “mask” and found I still have some proportion problems I need to fix, mostly around the mouth. I suspect I’m going to be working on improving the face for the next couple weeks, while my math institute is in session, it’s 6 units of upper division and graduate credits crammed into three weeks, so the workload is rather intense. I really want a couple dozen quality hours to work on the body when I get started, and it looks like all I’ll be able to manage is bits and pieces here and there, at least until the 29th. Just in time for the Summer of Documentation to wrap up and all the new tutorials hitting the web…sigh. I’ll never catch up.
