Female anatomy study

FourtyNights

Hi, it's been a very long time since I posted my work around here. I decided to make this thread, because I hope to become a character artist one day.

I've been sculpting this for a couple of days, and I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to move on to smaller details. I don't want to go there before getting all the major issues fixed on anatomy (muscles, bony landmarks, shapes and silhouettes) and proportions. Hands and feet need more work, of course.

Actually I already started to see things bugging me after rendering these, but I'd love to get feedback for improving... because there's ALWAYS something to make better. (:

FourtyNights

Damn these threads get buried so easily. Bump.

almighty_gir

hey man, i saw this yesterday and intended to give some feedback but got buried under work.

It looks like you've got a good basic understanding of anatomy but you're missing some of the subtleties. for example, her posture suggests she's pulling her shoulders back, but where the deltoid joins onto the chest and wraps the humerous suggests her shoulders are pushed forward.

in the 3/4 view, the steep/harsh concave suggests she's really sucking her tummy in hard, but in the side view you can see it's sitting naturally. i really like the transition of the hips down into the pelvis though, that looks really nice.

her sternomascloid is incredibly sharply pronounced, it needs softening up a lot to make the neck look less tense. the side of the neck curves out too much onto the trapezius as well, should go straighter down, with a more or less 45 degree intersection.

the head is where the most prominent problems are though. she's got a real bug eyed look going on. the eyes are a little too far apart and the eyelids are too wide/tense. the upper eyelid cuts really deep into the fatty region just below the eyebrow too and the transition of that fatty region into the side of the head needs to be a lot smoother.

Her nostrils are reeeeally shallow, there's no vertical depth to them, it looks like there's a hole and then they stop, it's almost like she's snarling with her nose but the rest of her face forgot what it's supposed to do. you could also benefit from making the nasolabial folds less pronounced as she's got a grandma look going on. and then puff out the area just below that fold, but above her upper lip. generally just smooth it out.

stevston89

Good start! To add to what gir is saying. The forehead is way too big and head overall is too big. The abdominal crease in the center of the body is way to sharp and deep. Also the ribcage should meet in a more of rounded point closer to a "u" than a "v". The shoulders are pushed up real high and the legs are a bit long. Oh and the feet are a bit big.
I did a fast paintover to show my suggestion (current on the left and my suggestion on the right):

FourtyNights

Very good points from both of you, almighty_gir and stevston89, I'll keep everything you said in mind and keep updating this thread as frequently as I can. And, thank you.

pior

You might want to look up pictures of 3d scans displayed with simple CG material similar to the one you are using, pictures of people with uniformly applied body paint and/or heavy circus makeup, and pictures of full body casts.

You will be surprised by how subtle the surface changes are on the real thing. CG sculpting has a tendency to make the artist mark landmarks a bit too heavily (probably because of the lack of a realistically rendered preview while working) - which seems to coincide with you noticing issues only after you produced the lit and shadowed renders posted above.

Some examples -









A good way to avoid the "over-marking" problem is to set your sculpting package so that light is not coming from the camera, but from above the model instead. In zbrush this is only possible with non-matcap materials, and similarly in Mudbox you need to use non-litsphere shaders, combined with the light positionning/locking options. Enabling cast shadows from time to time is also helpful in both apps.

I hope this helps !

FourtyNights

Cool, my sculpting package is ZBrush, and I tend to switch between a couple of materials and change the position of light as well (like with a BasicMaterial). In those renders I used Blender for better view of perspective than in Zbrush though.

For the anatomy references I use some of those castings and I just got my PDF copy of the pre-ordered Anatomy for Sculptors book. That's one hell of a thorough visualization of the human anatomy in that book.

And thanks for the hints, pior.

FourtyNights

Getting the cheek area right have been quite a struggle lately, even though I'm not going to define the anatomy on them so "exaggeratingly". Still, I've improved the head a lot though, I hope. I've also done lots of good adjustments to the body as well, but this defining the cheeks has been bugging me:

EDIT: Sorry for those artifacts on very quick renders inside ZBrush. And, I'll post progress of the body after getting the head to its final state.

FourtyNights

After a long break I looked back to this project a couple of weeks ago, and started to tweak the anatomy even further. My new plan is going to develop her to be an own version of Lara Croft.

So, I'd like to get my hands on clothing as soon as possible, because I've spent too much time around sculpting the anatomy. Now, I need to hear from the professionals what can be improved before even thinking about clothing. I'm always sceptic about the anatomy and even now I'm unsure about the acceptable level of convincing human anatomy in this...

Anchang-Style

The clavicula: that's not really where it's located or what it looks like. It should be lower, less present. Even for woman it is for the most part covered by the origin of the pectoralis major and the deltoid. It really is only visible at the little groove between the two. The Deltoid is rather off as well. The frontal part of the deltoid has it's origin point at the clavicule, the rear part goes pretty far into the scapular spine. Even if it doesn't really grab onto the bone, but rather looks like a tear drop with non muscle fibers (forgot the term) connecting it to the bone indirectly. The Pectoralis and Deltoid looks more like 2 panels than muscle regions. They flow go into or over each other. For you, especially on the shoulder and frontal region, the muscles look like seperat entities.
But the level of muscularity is a bit weird. She is muscular enough to have a real biceps and triceps and deltoud showing and such a back definition but no visible abs and actual belly fat and such thick legs? If you look at Thai Boxing Girls or Free Running girls (which might be the body type you were going for here) you will see the body fat amount would be very different as would be the muscle definitions and visibility.