Male Face Sculpt

As I've been getting into the swing of things I've been doing more drawing (as well as reading) which will eventually get scanned and uploaded to this blog. I decided that it was time to do another head sculpting session to see how my understanding of the face was coming along since the sculpt I did a few weeks ago.

I began this sculpt in the same way as I previous ones with a simple sphere which I pushed and pulled into shape. The best thing about zbrush is being able to hop up and down subdivision levels, creating big details at low levels and fine details higher up. The advantage of this also is I can drop down and carve things back and rebuild which happen multiple times across this sculpt. I still find it tricky to place eyes correctly and sculpt the eye socket, I found it much easier carving out the skulls eye sockets placing the eye balls and then building up the muscles surrounding the eye. In the early stages I wasn't using any subdivision levels just dynamesh to retopo the mesh as I pulled out new areas. However it came to a point when I would need to do a structured retopo of the model to give better resolution in the areas such as the eyes and mouth. So I used polypaint to plan out my topology over the model and then used the retopo tools.



The new base mesh was much more efficient and would deform well if animated due to good resolution in areas of deformation and careful places of poles to avoid nasty deformation. The theory being once I had finished my high detailed mesh I could directly export one of the retopo low sub division levels which would make a good low res mesh without any additional work. So I began working up various details, dropping back down to tweak the shape of the face and the position of the features. Once things were starting to get more complete I created a quick piece of place holder hair geometry. Often it can be hard to look a face and see what is wrong with it when it had no hair.


I am reasonably happy with the improvement in this sculpt. The mouth and lips are still a weaker region for me, the eyes are a major improvement but I still haven't got to the stage in my understanding of the human face that I can just pull them of a sphere, I have to build up the bony landmarks of the skull first and go from there. Apparently my understanding of the forms of the skull are much better. Having spent some time examining, drawing and sculpting both I feel the male face is much easier. Creating accurate female faces is tricky as you have use details in a much more subtle way, and as a result are constantly trying to balance a featureless face with one that looks aged due to over use of lines. The male face doesn't seem to age with the addition of certain lines in the way the female face does.

Concept

There was no avoiding it, eventually I would have to stop drawing/sculpting monsters and ugly things and actually start working my way up to creating realistic humans, which are really the hardest thing you can draw, nothing is as scrutinised as the human face, we see them nearly every minute of everyday (unless your a touch on the agoraphobic side) and even if artistically we can't tell you what is wrong with a face we know when something is (more on the uncanny valley later). Any hoo for my L6 Specialist Study 1 I shall be doing a lot of research/drawing/sculpting to really bone up on my understanding of the human face and its expressions. I will for my final piece be submitting a game character head which will hopefully have benefitted from my research and be to a very high quality. So to kick things of here is a digital paint over I did on top the base proportions for the head from zbrush. The character I will be modelling is female (but also bald, which is a bit weird but thats the brief). In the interest of keeps things short this image shows a number of apparant areas for me to concentrate on: eyes, they are expressive and tricky to get right but particularly the the dimensionality of the eye socket; lips; and the eye brows, as you can see from this list basically any part of the face used to convery expression. Looking at this drawing the character looks very melancholy which seems to be an expression I was made to draw. I need to understand how moving certain facial features affect the perceived expression so I can use them correctly.

Overdue Update

This blog is due an update me thinks, although this post is going to follow a similar vein to my last. Last night I decided to have a break from work and just mess around in zbrush and see what came out. I'm rather pleased as so far I've managed to spend a fair few hours in zbrush which is my resolution for this academic year. This sculpt was done in an hour and a half and I'm quite impressed with what I've managed to get done in the time. One area I'm looking at improving in my modelling is my ability to come up with interesting hard surface designs, on things like armour etc, at present this is probably the biggest time sink in my modelling. Anyway there isn't much more to say about this and I'm trying to keep the posts short so enjoy.