Christian Bale Likeness WIP--Feedback please!

Colton

I'm having a hard time pinning down this Christian Bale Likeness. Any tips would really help. 

There is some detail left over from an older projection but all of that will be redone--for now I'm back to nailing down solid anatomy and the likeness. Let me know what I can improve!

Thanks!

More of my references for the sculpt: https://www.pinterest.com/coltoncross3/christian-bale/

moonlazer

Hey @Colton

This is a great start, you can definitely see him in there.
 
One tricky thing to consider with likeness studies is the actor across the spectrum of their career and how their face ages. Bale is a method actor so his body undergoes drastic weight transitions from role to role. This can affect overall body weight and how much fatty tissues in his face.

1.) With that his cheekbone is more pronounced but a little inset in the buccinator region can help this.
2.) Depending on your plan for a expression, you may want to give his lips that pucker thing he does.
3.) His outer lip lines up perfectly with the center of is iris. Depending on if you move the eye or lips for proportion checks.
4.) Depending on reference/expression, he has a little amount of fat going down from his nose.(cheek/laugh line area)
5.) Back of skull appears to be flat/square like.
6.) Top of his ear appears to be right at the corner of the eye. The bottom of the ear also seems to continue an arch movement but your sculpt has is slump a bit.
7.) The orbital muscles around his lips are a bit more round of a shape. May be able to just move geo for the shape of the mouth, coming from the nose to get a more orbital shape versus making mouth bigger.
8.) The muscles to the outside of the eye for the brow ridge end roughly at the center of the eye.
9.) Top of forehead recedes a bit.

Hope this helps, keep it up! o/

Colton

@moonlazer
Awesome feedback. I did my best to go through each of your points. I wasn't sure exactly what you were describing with point 7 and I'm having the most trouble around the lips. Let me know what I can still improve.

I started adding in some basic hair to see how things were looking. I'm new to fiber mesh so if anyone has ideas on how to make it look realistic I would love to hear you've got. My hair currently looks very fake.

I would like to do the final render in Keyshot which is also new to me. I think I'm going to just do a grey scale render so I can get on to the next sculpt asap. 

I'll post better images in an hour when I wrap up for the night. 

Colton

Yeah the hair in particular isn't looking so hot. I would still like to refine a few more base shapes as well if anyone has any ideas on what would make it look more like Bale. 

Once I do one more round on the forms, I'll do another pass of the pore detail because the older one has been smoothed out almost completely. 

Again, I'm planning to do a greyscale render in Keyshot as the final image so let me know if you have any pointers for that.

Thanks!

Ref:

moonlazer

Nice changes! For fiber mesh, try adjusting different values like coverage. Coverage will effect the thickness of the hair. You can also go into the move tools brush settings and turn off masking by roots. (I think you have to do that for the transpose tool as well). It'll allow you to move everything around freely. Also try making different chunks and moving each hair clump around/duplicating them to get thicker, more varied hair.

In terms of what I meant by number 7, sorry haha. I was having a hard time explaining it but I'll try to show here. You'll have to excuse my terrible photoshop I'm out and about with a laptop and no wacom.


So first thing is the yellow is for changes to shapes. Orange is to illustrate how the muscles circling the eyes flow across the forehead but also cause the separation or dip into the forehead, thus separating the forehead from the eyebrow ridge. I'd say try unifying it with a little smoothing or add some geo.

Finally the bottom pic is what I was trying to explain for 7. Though it may not apply depending on your reference. Green shows how monkey like his mouth region is with how deep the cheeks go in. The top green line is the little fat that can follow down by the nose. Red is for the dip in transition from cheekbone to mouth. Hence the buc muscles. Chin and blue lines are just general geo flow/shape.

Hope this helps! o/

Colton

@moonlazer
Great feedback again. Very helpful. I'm going to keep trying to push the likeness but I'm going to move forward on the hair and skin detail.

I made a lot of progress on the hair tonight, though it looks odd because I made it darker just before I took the renders. I'll need to tweak that tomorrow. Picked up some helpful tips on this site for getting the right thickness for the hair: http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/zbrush/fibermesh/fibermesh.html

Eyebrows need to be cleaned up and he needs eye lashes. . . 

As always, feedback is welcome.

Croftyness

Hey, Looking good. Fibremesh is a world of pain (for me anyway), especially when it comes to something so precise like eyebrows and moustaches . You can try ZBrush insert meshes or poly drawing in 3DsMax to lay down some basic hair directions. After that you can move them around as clumps with the move tool or individually with polygroups for more precision. Then for really unique hairs (around the boarders) you can just manually place them. Sounds long winded but actually doesn't take up that much time in comparison. Bao Vu does this in one of his projects, he also has a pretty sweet description of it found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xogKW

Dave

Jakub

First of all, pick one movie with Bale that you want likeness from. He looks different in most of the movies he does, his fat % changes, makeup etc.

The likeness is somewhere there, but if you really want to push it further you need to read up on face anatomy. You have few areas that are lacking the knowledge what's under the skin - forhead, jaw(masseter), eye socket. Likenes is probably the hardest part of digital sculpting and without knowing how shapes are created under the skin, it's almost impossible to nail it down.

I'd do some overpaints, but I suck at it, sorry

Colton

@Croftyness That looks like a great overview. I saw a few other people mention doing it with a cone mesh but this goes into more detail. I'll try pulling the old eyebrows out and trying that for the eyebrows and eye lashes. 

@Jakub Yup, you're totally right. The anatomy needs work. I'm starting to plateau with what I can learn on this sculpt so I'm probably going to wrap it up soon and move on to the next one. I'm primarily using the Anatomy for Sculptors book and the Grassetti tutorials--if you have any other suggestions for good resources, let me know:)

Jakub

@Colton

I used the same, but what helped me the most is Portraiture Class with Scott Eaton. Totally worth the money.

Colton

@Jakub

I have heard a lot of good things about Scott's classes. I would love to take them at some point. 

Colton

Thanks again for the feedback, everyone. I'm calling this done for now mostly because I have only seen marginal improvements in the sculpt over the last week. At some point I'll go back and touch up the sculpt after I have some more practice.

I ended up leaving the eyebrows as FiberMesh but I did the eyelashes with individual cones thanks to the tutorial that @Croftyness posted. 

@Jakub I stuck with this photo and referenced Christian Bale from Terminator as much as I could.