Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) WIP - Feedback Appreciated
Hello,
I'm currently making a character model for Kurt Russell's 'Snake Plissken' character from the movie 'Escape From New York' and I would really appreciate some feedback or some fresh eyes on this, as I'm struggling alot on the facial likeness right now.
Bare in mind this is still polypainted version with no final textures, I feel like I need to get the proportions right before I move onto concrete details, but maybe that's what's stopping me from getting this right.
*If you don't want to see the entire process, Iteration 5 has the latest version I'm working on, you can skip to that*
1st refinement (No Hair)
This is how the refined version started off, before I figured the eyes might need shrinking down:
2nd refinement - (With Hair, Eyes/Eyebrows Tweaked)
I was fairly content with the first version, but the likeness was clearly off, so I decided to focus more on the eyes since I thought it would look more accurate being smaller.
I felt like the shadows in the below image brought out the Snake Plissken look alot. So I was very conflicted, I knew I had the right facial structures but the eyes still did not sit right with me yet.
For the third refinement, I decided to removed some of the polypainted dark shading around the eyes to see what would happen. This is also the version with smaller eyes:
Even though this version looks a lot more realistic, I feel like I was starting to lose the likeness and decided to scrap this, as with each iteration after this (smoothing the eyes bags, lowering the eyes from the eyebrows) it was starting to look worse and not as young as I'd like it to appear. I went back to Iteration 2 and build it again from there.
Iteration 4:
I was okay with how this looked, but I wanted to add in some harsher details and decrease the eye size again.
Iteration 5 (Trying Smaller Eyes again and straightening eyebrows):
So with this being my latest version, I feel more conflicted than ever, it seems as if whenever I attempt to decrease the eye size, the model looks a little more realistic but with the price of the likeness fading away.
An interesting observation is that, the model looks good enough from a more distant perspective regardless of what I do to the face, below is an example (Iteration 5 far away version):
Iteration 3 (Far away Version):
I'm also debating whether I should settle for any version and continue on with the rest of the model (Hair cards, baking, texturing and detail projection etc.) Just to see if it would help. The reason why I don't want to continue with the rest of the pipeline is because I would prefer to get the likeness and proportions correct before I move onto the rest.
Anyways, it would be appreciated to get some fresh eyes on this, as I might be going crazy here and not used to doing realistic likeness models all that much. Any improvements/critiques would be well noted:)
Replies
i think that it looks like snake, but in a stylized approach. either way nice work.
@TRAUMWELT75 thanks a ton for your input, its interesting to see it come across as stylised but the likeness is what I am going for, so if you can see Snake then I think my goals have been met :)
I honestly needed some time away from the model, to see things better. My recent shot with post-processing here makes it look a bit more realistic, which is what I'm aiming for.