Help with Hard surface likeness

DrBombs

Hello Everyone!

First, thanks in advance for taking the time to read and answer my questions!

So here is the thing, I have been modeling the Robocop, the old one from 1987, I have fully modeled the head inside Zbrush:

And I have been trying to achieve a very close likeness from it's actual movie from 1987, my goal is to make a render that people won't know if it is from the movie or a 3D render.

Now the thing is, achieving likeness having been quite a struggle to me, and boy I have taken so many references, I've got the movies and watched all of them, scanned through the movie dozens of times, took pictures as much as I could from as many angles as possible, even being able to get a 360 angle from it's head, and many many other references, eg:

Also the more I take pictures, the more I realize that they used different camera lenses changing the fov and distorting the objects, making it even harder to reproduce it, any hints on that?

I also got some references that were really good and took a screenshot throwed inside photoshop mirrored it and used it to model over it:

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Now even with all the references I have gathered I am still having a really hard time getting to my desired results, I tried both polygon modeling and sculpting, sculpting seems to be THE BEST and most flexible to get to the shapes and proportions and details right, but it seems that doing the simple blockout to be much easier/quicker inside Maya/Blender.

I am having a really hard time getting to the real thing both in Zbrush or in Maya/Blender, I am just stuck not knowing exactly where and how to get there, I keep repeating moving vertices left and right up and down and it just doesn't seem right. In a way samething happening inside Zbrush.

It seems to me the simple blocking/proportion would be ideal inside Blender/Maya, but the detailing, getting it really close to the real deal would be inside Zbrush/sculpting software I guess?

What workflows do you guys suggest? How would you approach this? Am I doing something wrong here? Am I missing something here? Or is this just that freaking hard and I need more patience and get good?

Thanks in advance again!!!

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, it just takes patience and sticking with it.

Those who are really good at 3d portraiture did not just spring out of the earth fully proficient.

It takes dedication, constant iteration, making mistakes and learning from them.

You're doing the right things.

An important bit of advice at this point is that perfection is the enemy of completion. Learn when to say "enough is enough" to complete a task and be able to move on to the next project.

Otherwise you'll never get anything done. Working through all stages of a project is in itself an important learning experience.

Good luck, stick with it!