One of my friends
I'm actually re-posting this one since the title for my earlier WIP thread for this character seemed to throw many people off (otherwise I would have posted these updates there). I basically took one of my friends and made him into a game character, focusing on getting his likeness (particularly the face). And that seems to be the most difficult part. Current count is 5608, most recent realtime caps beneath the ref sheet. Suggestions on improving the likeness?
Replies
there's some unusual geometry in the face and head area. I bet you could remove those triangles pretty easily.
the likeness is pretty close, but not close enough in my opinion. I'm assuming you did this model off of your reference photos, where your friend is smiling in all of the pictures, but you modeled him with a static facial pose. I reckon you go take some more reference photos of your friend not smiling and adjust your model accordingly
lastly, the flesh isn't the right color and looks a little plastic-y. If you have access to zbrush, you might want to use the ZApplink program to project some nice photo reference on to the face to get a more accurate and realistic look.
Pretty good right now, and actually quite close in likeness, but just not close enough. Keep at it, get some new photo reference and touch up the texture to match a little closer and your project will be much better.
good so far! cheers
The triangulated faces on the face are temporary to fold the quads a bit better (some of them are slightly non-planar, but they don't mess up the normals). They tend to look a bit better when folded in a certain direction (I heard Max has a way for you to flip the tris without actually having to cut them, but I'm of course working in Maya).
What exactly do you think I'm missing with his face? People have been telling me that something's missing but not exactly what... guess it's a tough thing to precisely point out?
tip of the nose is too pointed, in the photos it looks a bit rounder, more sphere like instead of angular.
jaw is a bit too square just below the ears, in the photos, it looks more rounded and less defined.
upper lip terminates too harshly at the corners of the mouth, in the photos the upper lip appears more full at the edges than your model,
your model appears to have some kind of skull ridge protruding from the right side of the face, from the corner of the eye going back toward the ear and it's catching a highlight... i don't believe that your friends face has this in the photos. in the photos there seems to be a small circular ridge around the corners of the eyes, but terminate early instead of extending back in to the hairline (this is hard to describe, sorry if it confuses)
and the overall color of the skin is just too brown. Asians tend to have more of a golden ochre tone to the flesh. The color you are using now is leaning more toward that of a hispanic or mulato person. Try recoloring the texture as if you were going to color a white person, and instead of using brown for your shadows, use more hints of yellows. Look at color illustrations for reference on this. It will probably be hard to get the exact color correctly because actual skin has subsurface scattering that changes with light, angle, and temperature. Go less brown, more tan/yellow. You might even be able to salvage your texture by adjusting hues and sat and balancing color in photoshop, but ultimately will probably have to go back in and recolor a good amount of it.
Hope this helps!
I'd say for the next project focus on cleaning up the low poly geo a bit. The face is a bit chaotic, and work on general proportions. keep posting!
-Woog