[WiP] - Yolandi Visser
polycounter lvl 4
Finished Yolandi
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I'm sculpting a bust of Yolandi Visser. It was gonna be a more of just a quick practice of faces, but I also need practice with hair and painting and really the whole pipeline. I have more experience in making props rather than people, but I find making people rather fun as well.
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I'm sculpting a bust of Yolandi Visser. It was gonna be a more of just a quick practice of faces, but I also need practice with hair and painting and really the whole pipeline. I have more experience in making props rather than people, but I find making people rather fun as well.
Replies
Started with a ball, then spent approximately two and a half hours to get to this. So far, not bad. I can see I need to do a couple of tweaks on the cheek, and I had some trouble sculpting out eyelids and lips. It occurred to me that maybe I should watch a sculpting workflow video of faces. I'll be putting in ears next time.
I spent several hours today:
I'm not sure if the ears are too small looking or not. I've made many tweaks, like moving the eyes closer together and fixing the head shape. I'm thinking I'm gonna move onto the hair.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=144730
Current progress:
I think I need to make a few adjustments to the ears, but otherwise, I think the face is a whole lot closer to what she looks like.
It appears that you focused mostly on getting the head to look good from the front and side views, but not as much on the 3D form as a whole. Look at the 3/4 view in your latest sculpt - the profile of her left cheek (picture plane right side) from the slope of her forehead to her brow ridge to her eye down to her chin. Now look at the 3/4 view photo of her from the original reference that you posted. They're very different.
Her forehead is more vertical, yours is more sloped. Your brow ridge sticks out farther than hers. Your lower cheeks are gaunt and convex. Hers are fuller. Your chin is more vertical / sticking far forward. Hers slopes back more as it gets lower. The photos that Steve Schulze posted are helpful but you can't just trace over that bottom one exactly for her profile view, since you're sculpting a neutral facial expression and she's making a funny face in that photo.
Also in that profile photo her head is tilted down, and it looks like you took those alignments and applied them to her head-straight-forward profile. On your model the angle of the jaw is as high as the corner of her mouth. If you draw a straight line through the profile view photo her jaw angle may be in line with her mouth, but if she tilted her head so it were straight instead of down, the angle of her jaw would be lower. Same with her ears. On your model they're really high. Ears are usually roughly as high as the eyes and as low as the bottom of nose or philtrum. Looking at the photos of Visser it does indeed appear that her ears are much higher than average. But it also looks like you exaggerated this height. One other thing on the ears, looking at her from the front view the angle at which they stick out from her head looks steeper in the photos than in your model.
The eyes, nose, mouth, and lips on your model are individually are believable, but put together they appear not quite right. I still advise just a bunch of rough head sculpting practice before trying to sculpt a realistic likeness of someone with unique and somewhat atypical features, which is quite a challenge.
Also if you're copying photos, features will look different depending on the focal length of the camera that took the photo. If I recall correctly, Zbrush's camera options don't quite work the same as real world cameras. This is something I posted a while back illustrating how camera angle affects how faces appear (yeah my head model here sucks, it's just an example)
http://jariensky.tumblr.com/post/50366402388/importance-of-matching-real-virtual-camera-focal
Hm well that was way more than I intended to write. Hope all this helps! If you're posting general rough facial practice elsewhere, post a link here!
Thanks for all the pointers! I really was using the first image in that post as a reference from front view, I didn't actually realise that she was tilting her head downwards quite a bit. I thought, maybe her ears really are that high. And focal length distortion wasn't something I had considered before.
Alot of times when I work on something for hours in one sitting, I really can't see the weird parts until I spend some time away and not seeing my work. I think I'll do a planar head sculpt for study/practice before I come back to Yolandi.
One thing you might try is taking a screengrab of your sculpt and your reference, taking it into photoshop and flipping them both upside down. Will give your brain the opportunity to observe your shapes with fresh eyes.
Reference I swiped off the net:
My work:
The warping in the reference photos makes it more challenging.
This is what I've got now, I've checked back to make sure I addressed every issue that's been mentioned. I think I'll start on a low poly version next and some mock-ups on the hair (I'm thinking a mesh for the short hair on front and planes for the rest), but this also means I can still do smaller changes before I bake maps if anyone spots anything that's still off.
^^ Thanks for checking in on me SeveredScion!
I bought Substance Live last week and have been learning to use it. So far I've been having fun using it.
I did a test export into UE4, and the materials were far too shiny. That's something I need to figure out I guess. I'm not liking the hair mesh, I feel like its too detailed/noisy so I'll be changiing that.
Pitbull Terrier Yolandi isn't too far from being done. I'm thinking of making a Cookie Thumper and an Ugly Boy version.
I redid the hair quite a few times, and I think I'm gonna change the hair again for the one on the right. These are not the final versions yet. Well except for the one on the left, I don't have anything more to add. I'm thinking the AO overlay is a bit much for the short hair and braid.
@Ged I was quite uncertain about her skin. Like, she wears a face full of concealer to appear paler for her image and generally face make-up is for anti-shine. I think the material could be better as well, but I've decided to move on and maybe come back with a fresher outlook.