Here is my first attempt at sculpting a female head. My aim was photo realism. Any constructive criticism would be appreciated. I intend to add more detail after I re-topo. This is as detailed as my computer can handle right now.
Hey… Nice going for your first sculpt! My first head sculpt looked like something that was in the microwave to long…
A few things that might help you with future sculpts. Keep the mesh as simple as you can and only focus on the overall form at first. It will help avoid lumpy sculpts. This is tough but if you do, you will see improvements fast. I know you were trying to copy the image of the girl but use a mirror modifier as long as you can for now. You can add asymmetry in the face later. It will help with getting the shapes right first. Later when you are a pro at it you can dive into asymmetry sooner. You also said you are aiming for photo real…it might be a bit soon for that if it is your first sculpt but if you do want to achieve it, you will need to pay special attention to the eyes and from your sculpt I can also see you need to look at more ear reference. The more we do anatomy sculpting the more we realize how little we know and how much we need to improve still…so just keep at it. Sorry I did not give you any direct feedback on how to copy your goal face but at this stage my advice would be not to worry about getting a good likeness but rather good features. Once you can sculpt all the features of the face well, you will be able to get a likeness much easier.
Dunno too much about proportions, but the ears seem definitely to far back.
Get some more reference images of human proportions, and see how close you are getting. And as you are retopologizing correct your mistakes.
You can put an empty with an image on it in the 3D Viewport, and drop into orthographic view from time to time as you sculpt to check your proportions. At this point, additional details will not give you a good result, since most of the proportions are off, some significantly. I agree with Shakedown, go for the correct shape of large masses before you try for details.
You may want to try going into edit mode, and use box select and proportional editing to push the features into more or less correct locations before going back into sculpt.
As far as asymmetry goes, that was on accident. I think I must have accidentally moved some vertices in edit mode, which would account for the asymmetry.
Thanks for the advice. I’ll keep that in mind during my next sculpt
I actually did have empties with images, but i hid them for the screenshot. How do I get my faces to look right when i come out of orthographic view. They look significantly different when i edit them in ortho and then switch to perspective.
Photographs are always in perspective view. That’s just the nature of cameras. So you have to be careful of what information you take from photographs when you are modeling in orthographic view. Say you have a front view, like the image you included in your screenshot. You can be pretty confident that the width of the head and the height of the head are good. You can also rely on the locations of the corners of the eyes and mouth. However, the nose will appear slightly larger, because it is protruding, and if her ears were visible, they would appear slightly smaller, because they are further away.
How much distortion depends on how close the camera is to the subject. The further away the camera, the ‘flatter’ (more orthographic) the image.
And to add a second point, it depends on the focal length the camera was set to, when the portrait photo was taken. A long focal length is more orthographic than a short focal length. So photographers usually use a focal length of 80+ for portraits to have an image that represents the face well. A short length like 35 mm and below distorts the face.
Blender’s viewport works with a certain lens and it defaults to 35mm for perspective view. You can set this value in the n panel under view.
Okay, I’ll take that into consideration. Thanks for the help, especially regarding which parts of the image to trust. Hopefully with practice I can make more accurate faces