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.