Expression Tests

I've been starting to pose the model create some expressions. This has been going well and I'm really feeling like this project is finally coming to a close. The hair still needs to be textured up, maybe you can tell that I'm procrastinating from that a lil bit. I'm quite pleased with a lot of these shots, although they will need to be worked into a bit more. I'm finding it quite hard to adapt the research I've done into human facial expressions into this model. Which isn't unexpected due to his very different facial structure. His face shape lends itself, as with his character, to more aggressive expressions. And due to his more prominent lower jaw, the corners of the mouth don't move up well. Animals seem to convey more with the language of their body as a whole, whereas people are cable of conveying emotion with very slight facial indicators. Where I to go back and redo this project knowing I would be adapting quite an animalistic character as my final piece I would have done more research into animal faces, for instance how dogs look when they are happy, sad, etc. The centre image is the face at the default position I sculpted it, which I feel is quite a neutral pose for the character. The fourth from the left is by far my favourite, the shouting pose works so well with the character. The closest to the right is the least aggressive and although its subtle I think really works, I think the position of the head makes him look proud. An the lowering of the corners of the mouth demonstrates that it looks more natural when the corners of this mouth move down rather than up due to the construction of his jaw/teeth. The closest to the left is the best happy expression so far, I'm attempting to create a snarly/smirk using one corner of the mouth. I think this is on the right track but needs to be more exaggerated in order to read well. Originally I was thinking of doing six renders but there is a nice symmetry to five. Also a lot of the major human expressions I conveyed through how you can see the eyes. In my experiments so far the animal eyes I've give are not expressing in the same way, and to him give pupils is going to be quite strange due to the position of the eye, I think he might look constantly cross eyed.