[Seeking Feedback] Sculpting a Masculine Head/Face Study
Hi all. Been trying to learn head/facial anatomy with the long term goal of eventually doing full characters for animation. I used Robert Pattinson for reference and tried to focus on trying to parse masculine features (supraorbital ridge, masseters, more prominent chin, less-rounded features) rather than fail at a likeness. I've only recently been trying to take 3D seriously and am having some trouble with separating what I'm doing right and wrong in terms of anatomy. I feel like I made the sculpt convincingly masculine, but am having problems with improving individual areas (particularly the eyes, ears, lips, and the cheek area beneath the eyes) and making the sculpt more convincing as a human in general. Any advice and insight would be much appreciated!
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Hey, if you don't mind me asking, what program are you using for sculpting, and do you have access to Photoshop or something similiar (Krita, Gimp, etc)? I ask because I know that Zbrush has a feature where you can make the whole program transparent so that you can sort of "trace" over the thing you're trying to sculpt. Other sculpting options like mudbox or blender should also have some option to import images and make your model transparent so you can compare. And if none of those options work, you could bring the screenshot into photoshop/whatever and overlay it with the thing you're sculpting to see where you're having issues---that has helped me a lot. It's not perfect because you'll rarely find perfect front/side pictures of real people other than mugshots, but it can help to give you an idea.
Here I've overlayed front and side pictures of Robert Pattinson that I found on Google images onto your model. Maybe from this you can already see what's going on. The biggest proportional issues I see is that from the side, the neck is extremely thin and the back of the head is very large---His cranium is also probably too tall and too wide from the front. Also, learn about focal lengths and keep them in mind, and pay attention to whether you are sculpting in orthographic or perspective mode. Every picture you see of the same person may have a different focal length or a different distance from the subject which affects proportions.
Drawing and sculpting skulls can be a great exercise for picking up an intuitive understanding of facial anatomy. I keep a medical replica on my desk for this purpose.
Hey :)
You could identify features and proportions by painting them in on reference images.
Another point is to get the proportions and placement down at a low res, before increasing resolution and detailing anatomy.
I like to have reference model open in sketchfab. Keep in mind with stylized references reality was already processed. Scanned or medical models are probably more accurate.
Good luck!