Chick Head WIP

Japhir

Hey guys,

I've been working on this head lately. already posted some wip's in P&P, but worked on it a lot more so here are the latest updates.

previous wip's:
click me

latest WIP:


reference sheet:


any crits welcome!

madmuffin

Good progress, definitely more feminine then it was before. Keep at it.

Frump

You have a lot of references of Front and Side views. I think you are putting too much emphasis on those. The real essence of the face is from the forms in 3d. Get more references of people's heads on different angles and see how those look. As well, I don't think the ideal beauty face pictures are very good references as they themselves are paintovers and too idealized.

One big thing that you are missing right now about female facial structure is that, often their cheekbones extend further out than their brow ridges in 3/4 view. Likewise, with men the brow mostly extends further out than the cheekbones. Right now this is where your model is at.

Here's some more general crits and a paintover:
The eyebrow ridge and the skin there droops down towards the eye as it goes farther out. It droops more with age. Get rid of the double chin. Add more curve to where the lips meet and more volume to the lower lip. Make the chin sharper and less wide.

Good luck with this piece!:)

almighty_gir

oi! you stole my ref!

well.. i can only be pissed cos i bought the dvd, but still...

Kharn

I would reduce the distance between the nose and lips.

Frumps paintover look good ^^
You might have an easier time doing these adjustments in zbrush with the move tool, just a though

good luck & have fun

CheeseOnToast

Agreed with Kharn, the distance between upper lip and nose is a bit "Bruce Willis" at the moment. Could be a bit shorter.

frubes

This has got a lot of potential japhir and the overal modelling is nice. The only thing i would say is that you have three poles on the same loop going from the cheeck bone to the jowls you get when smiling just to the left of the nose. If you can move those onto different loops and into areas which wont be getting deformed the head would work really nicely for animation.

Neox

as you will possibly scult on it or even are thinking on animating it with some meshsmooth later, i'd totally gat rid of the super poleheavy area over her nose, thats really a bad bad topy there, same in the mouth-cheekbone are you have there 3 poles right next to each other you should try to arange them a bit better.

Hazardous

Frumps paintover is good. Id definately make those changes, definately shorten the distance between the upper lip and the nose. And this is just personal preference but I would also try to shape the eyelids a little more like so:



At the moment they are too rounded and 'blank emotionless robot stare' rather than relaxed eye.

Also my view on those face references, especially the ones that are generated by overlaying hundreds of photos to get the averages - takes away all the genetic differences and tweaks that the various races have by default - you end up with this very alien kind of proportion.

I guess its good for a base mesh, but not really so good for drawing 'character' out of a face, or drawing simple characteristics that are present in a caucasion or asian faces for example.

Keep going man looking forward to seeing this finished!

Japhir

Hey thanks a lot for all the crits guys! I've tried to implement all of them .



neox: is the geometry around the nose better? I'm not quite sure yet how i'll get rid of all those poles on that edgeloop. I'm not sure I'm going to sculpt her later on, but I might.

EDIT: btw, the eye geometry was an experiment, to see if smoothing groups would make it prettier

Neox

bah retopo in 2d is really a bit of a brainfuck
if you have the time, come in skype

StevenEgan

Hey Japhir, I haven't seen you or your stuff for years man! I remember you from psionic's forums :P ... if that's actually you. Looks like you've sored with all your low poly stuff.

Nice work on the head model.

Japhir

StevenEgan: hey! yeah i was back on psionic's forums way back when . i've posted here quite regularly, but i'm kind of a slacker as well . what was your username there?

Neox: thanks a lot for helping me!!

neox helped me through skype, explaining about the annoying pole on her cheek and he also fixed some other stuff for me.

here's an update, I was trying to get that cheek pole more towards the eye, but I think this is as far as I can go .


any ideas on how to solve the flow there?

PS: i'm mainly concentrating on flow now, so that when that's all sorted out I can just import her in zbrush like suggested

ZacD

Really nice edge flow, can I see a smoothed wireless version? I don't see much of a temple, though.

Japhir

sure, didn't know if you meant turbosmoothed or smoothed, so here are both.

Calabi

It looks a bit weird to me now. Like a really young baby face. Not sure what it is, perhaps the cheeks chin area is too smooth, or the whole form is too uniform.

Nistrum

those cheeks remind me of marius from diablo 2 you really need to pull them up. right now she looks like an old woman with her skin sagging at her cheeks. either that or just REALLY tired.
dont take that badly though. its comming along really nicely

Wendy de Boer

The topology is a great improvement. I think the outer corners of the eyes got a bit too droopy though.

However, the part that stands out to me the most is the jaw. On the previous iteration it was much better, imho. The new version is very stunted, with no visible jawline. The jaw area has gotten much too rounded and mushy looking.

I would take a really good look at your model from a 3/4 perspective, especially the shapes surrounding the mouth, and compare with reference from a similar angle. Also look at the shutterstock ref on your sheet, and see how you can trace her jawline all the way back to her ear. It's quite defined and crisp. This line is missing altogether in your model, currently.

I know it's quite tempting to make a female jaw very small and rounded, kind of like a baby, but in reality female jaws are not that small, and often with good definition. Mainly you'll want to make the jaw and chin a bit sleeker and pointier than a male jaw, not necessarily much smaller.

StevenEgan

Japhir wrote: »

StevenEgan: hey! yeah i was back on psionic's forums way back when . i've posted here quite regularly, but i'm kind of a slacker as well . what was your username there?

I went by Stea_demon back then... wow... that was a long time ago.

Nice updates man.

Rens

Ditch those references, they are throwing things off.
Right now, it kinda looks like her face is melting.

Harshness,
the frame looks fine, but the placement of the components are off.
Start by moving her eyes and nose up, giving her mouth some space, this will allow you to bring in some jaw and get some side refs of skulls and find out where these parts should be compared to eachother.

Also the ear should be somewhere in the middle, the eye socked holds very little volume while thats a great way to give character.

learning this stuff can be done best in zbrush, grab the move tool and pull it to pieces and find out where you can go with it. dont like it just delete the layer and do it again \o/

Japhir

Hey crap! I just typed out an entire response and then it somehow disappeared .

ok retry:
Calabi: thanks. I tweaked a lot of stuff, and I hope this looks better.

Nistrum: I worked on those cheeks a lot, and also adjusted the droopy eyes.

DemonPrincess: thanks a lot . I looked over the reference again, and forced myself to work only in perspective to get this stuff done properly. I hope it's an improvement.

StevenEgan: thanks, yeah I remember there was this one challenge where we had to skin a lowpoly dude, and Psionic actually had nipple geometry on there XD. I tried texturing it but the uv's where so stretched that I thought i had learned everything i could over there .

rens: thanks! haven't moved into zbrush yet because I'm not that comfortable with the tools yet. I will have to learn sometime though, so next update will be zbrushy . i'll get me some scull ref and play around with the position of the components. thanks.

so here it is!


EDIT: btw, that ear topology shot is NOT taken from the side . it's not floating back that much. But it is still placed a bit too far to the back.

Kewop Decam

I'm not sure the ear needs that much fine topo if it's going into Zbrush. The thing is, when you full model out the ear like that, you kind of have to follow that flow in Zbrush. So if you changed your mind and wanted a different shaped ear, you might be in for a little frustration. I'd try to keep that topo extra simple so you can model any kind of ear. Also tris around the ear can cause pinching you might not want

But different strokes for different folks so there is no real "right" way.

Japhir

it's all quads . weird stretched quads, i give you that, but they are solely quads. .

thanks for the input. yeah Neox also mentioned that ear topology isn't really important since it's a rigid place when the face gets animated.

woogity

i would simplify the ear as well, when you divide it with so much detail in there in the low poly your gonna get tons and tons of faces in the ear that you could use to define something else.

Japhir

Ok i finally made some time to work on this again, but right now I have absolutely no idea if this is an improvement or not . (been staring at this gray stupid chick's face way too long).
so right now crits are most welcome!



ps: i tried to simplify the ear by merging verts 'n stuff, but it turned it into a lot of tris and cleaning all of that up would be a total drag . So i'll ether leave it like this or remodel the ear completely.

pps: i did most of the adjustments in zbrush this time, mostly using the move tool and standard brush. But it looks pretty ugly in there because zbrush triangulates big polygons with hard edges.