i dunno this is just my thoughts... Still a little weird looking but i think closer to looking like a female
Your nose imo needs to be a bit smaller, jaw rounder... lower half of the head should be smaller in general, eyes look like theyre up WAY too high to me, and cranium could be a little smaller once the eyes are fixed.
Again, im trying to make it look more recognisably female here.. as to whether it's more or less realistic or "correct" is anyone's guess
Male heads are easy because they can be ugly as hell and still accepted as "right"
Best advice at the moment is show the reference you're going from. That will make her easier to crit.
Best off the cuff crits are:
Jaw is to large/long. If you move the chin, jawline and lips up about the space of her eye socket she'll start to look more feminine,
A little more definition between skull and neck on the back wouldn't hurt. Eyes are spaced a bit far apart, but not terribly out of alignment.
Cheekbones could be raised a bit to make the eye socket seem less droopy/sleepy.
The other thing to remember is that human heads have a range of form and there are many a woman who, just in the face at least, could be mistaken for a man if they wore a buzzcut and no makeup.
A lot of what makes a girl feminine has more to do with presentation and personality than it does structure of her face.
What strikes me as odd is the relation between eyes and eye sockets - needs more room. Also you made the very common mistake of shaping the eye socket along the direction of the eyebrows - look at women with little or no eyebrow (blond) or skull references and it will become obvious.
Also try to control the eyelids more. You got a perfectly symmetrical almond eyelid outline - something you really need to avoid.
I really like the side view tho. Looks like an ex GF, kinda!
thanks a lot for the comments so far guys! really helpful, made some quick changes and already (i think) it's looking better.
@ vailias: i know about the presentation thing, it's always tricky because i never quite know what style hair i'd like to see on a model until i can visualise the face how i want it. but at the same time a face doesn't look quite right without hair .
first off fix them eyes. the shape is entirely wrong and its too flat. remember that the eyelids WRAP around the eyeball, right now, im not seeing that. also theres a lack of eye depth.
your eyes are on a region that is modeled too flat. when i look at the side view, i should be able to see the profile of the eye ball, in this case im cant see it. look at references, especially 3/4 view. look at wireframe views of other models and study.
also the upper skull is too narrow.
good luck!
drawover + a bunch of babbling notes on what i changed and why. Hopefully it helps. Did this with a mouse so sorry the lines and features are squiggly, i'm sure you know how noses and lips should look without me drawing them for you though
I tried to keep the general look (more masculine jaw, lower jaw, high eyes, big curving heart shaped face style cheeks) but conform it more to anatomical rules. Deviations from the normal proportions need to be subtle, a little goes a long way. http://i48.tinypic.com/i74ups.jpg
Your problem with the eyes is that your eyes are warping upwards at the outside -- like a reverse melting. The top lid should come downwards to meet the bottom lid on the outside, and then fold over -- the bottom lid does NOT draw upwards like a curtain. Additionally, the eye wraps outward along the skull a bit. The orbital cavity is big and squareish, and deeper on the outside (where the cheekbone forms its border) than it is on the inside. Fleshy bits have to fill that hole.
It's mostly the eyes that need change, I think. Sure, you've got plenty of areas that could use work (the lips are awfully flat), but they're not throwing you off so much. I actually disagree with a couple of points that EmAr makes, because not every woman has to be a thing-nosed, smooth-jawed generic supermodel.
The eyes, then! If I'd have to make a guess, it is that the eye balls are simply too big. It's a bit hard to tell on such a model, of course, but I think they're bigger than actual eyes - which are quite small, actually, when you touch them (closing your eyelids before feeling the size of your eyes is recommended). If you were to scale them down, the end of the eyelids on the outer side would be positioned more to the back, which I think they need to be (and that would also allow you to make the forehead rounder, another thing that I think would help). On the inner side, the eye lids don't even follow the eye ball anymore at some point, but the tear ducts. Look at the huge gap that Slipgatecentral has here because he doesn't have tear ducts.
These are just two cents. I don't think the femininity is all that much of an issue here. I think it looks female, and real women would be much harder to recognise without hair, eye lashes, make-up and breasts too.
The shape of your eyes are much better, but the ends of them are resting on the same line. I've pulled the tear duct down, and the ends of the eyelid pulled up. Fairly minor bits, as they could be a racial feature to some.
The big thing that bothered me was the orientation of the eyeballs. You've got them low and crossed. I've moved them out a little more, and up a considerable way. To me it makes the eyes appear more relaxed.
Darkening the iris & pupils would be a good shift towards being a human female, too.
It's looking much better, I'd say play around with the depth of the cheek bones a bit to see if you can pronounce it a bit more. But it may push it over the top.
I actually like it, she's got a lot of character and isn't your standard hot videogame female character...
soapbox, but i really hate posts like this.
It's way easier to make people with character but weird anatomy than it is to make people (especially women) with no character but solid, ideal anatomy. If this is an exercise, which it seems to be, it's really worth trying to make her a least fairly pretty. No reason to make her a super boring stepford wives type but at least hit some of the basic markers of ideal beauty. 'she has character!' isn't a valid excuse for shoddy anatomy. Once you get past the challenge to draw/paint/model more ideal men and women it's very easy to variate.
With a little more work (which i'm sure Gir is putting in) this model could have character and looks and anatomy.
And, on that note: I think the brow is a bit too soft and high, but only barely. On a Caucasian woman's brow i'm expecting it to be strong enough to shadow the eyes a bit, but obviously don't lose the rounded, womanly arc to it.
Additionally, i'm not buying the nose. It's a weird combination of flat and Caucasian and wide that doesn't really look right to me. More of a fakey cg vibe than an interesting anatomy vibe. The 'wings' of the nostrils seem too splayed out. I'd pull the edges in a bit more and narrow it into slightly more of a \_/ shape from the top. It looks awesome from the profile though.
made the eyes bigger
brought the eyes inward and down a little
plumped out the lips, but only a little
tried to define the cheek bones a little more
from the front, her lips remind me of Famke Jannsen...
the point of this project is to try and make something generic. while i'm using references of course, i'm not focusing on any one particular reference, and trying to steer away from any likenesses. i think it's going well, however without trying to make it look like someone, it sometimes doesn't even look human at all... weird.
I strongly recommend using photo reference of a single person.
For instance, when you're in a life drawing session, there aren't several models that you choose bits and pieces from. You focus on that subject for several hours and render them to the best of your abilities. In the process, you develop an eye for generic anatomy, but you also realize the features that make each face unique. Rinse and repeat.
When you become skilled enough to rely less on reference, then you can accurately 'fill in' these unique features on your own. You aren't at this point yet. So it does look somewhat alien and abstract, because 99% of people do not look like this. Some people do, and you think "huh, they look kinda strange," but that's not your target when studying anatomy.
Those sunken eyes look rather unhealthy. I'd fill in some of the cavity between the eye and socket.
The furrow under the cheekbone at the side looks a little overly defined.
If your new version still has the neck muscles laid out in the same fashion as the previous image, you need to have a look at how the neck joins the back of the skull.
She's still got teensy tiny ears.
You're getting there mate. Just a few more tweaks and you'll have something nice.
I have some crits for you but keep in mind that I´m not an expert myself. :poly121:
The face seems to lack depth, the space between the ear and the eye is very big.
The nose is very thin and the face all around has a lot of sharp edges I think you need to soften it up a bit.
The neck needs to connect to the back of the skull.
The ear seems to be too small.
The eyes are very close together and high.
The face seems to be too long.
This is improving in leaps every update, good job so far dude.
Jackablade and slaught make good points.
There are a few places where extrusions/depressions in the face are a bit over-defined and bulbous. To a degree this is a matter of taste, but at least on the cheekbone it definitely needs fixing. The issue is that you're cutting cavities in where you only need a transition from plane to plane. You can use a careful low power flatten brush to do this easily, or r3.5 has these 'mpolish' and 'hpolish' brushes that are basically super subtle subtractive clay brushes that are perfect for this kind of fix.
Also, i hate to crit another (generally awesome) paintover, but i want to point out a slight error in slaughts that's also kindof relevant to your model as is. In my first post i sortof cryptically wrote 'cheek goes behind brow, in front of jaw' -- what i meant was a little (and i think pretty important) note about the structure of the head.
It's a common mistake to see the outer end of the brow terminating at about the same place as the cheekbone and them kindof meeting in a point -- this is wrong. Take one look at a skull and you'll see that the brow stops pretty shallow on the face, whereas the cheekbone (specifically the Zygomatic arch) runs all the way back to the ear. Now, you don't want to cut out and overdefine this, skin and muscle and fat softens the area up to the point of the actual lines of the arch being almost irrelevant, but you've got to keep it in mind for the way the orbital cavity and cheekbone interact -- avoid that '>' shape meeting between the brow and the cheekbone. There's a > ish meeting between the brow and the face itself, but it's not as wide as the zygomatic arch, and then cheekbone runs back behind and outside of it.
due to having too many things to think about all at once, i've had to accelerate to the texturing stage.
which means i've baked down the normals (although i'm going to be redoing the lowpoly ear very soon).
the bake seems to have gone really smoothly and shouldn't need much (if any) photoshopping. texturing is fail as usual from me, but at least she looks somewhat female :P
keep the crits coming, would love to know what to change =]
I think maybe you are overworking this ? If you dont like the way she looks at the moment I would recommend going back to a low subdivision level and make a few rough studies from there.
Also, try to capture the style you want on pen and paper first - it will give you something to compare against.
I think the head needs to be squashed a bit so that the skull isnt so elongated. The ears also appear plastered to the head with almost no seperation on the back side. And based on the age you appear to be going for the drop off of skin under the jay seems a bit pre-mature, keep it flat along the bottom for at least the first 1/3 of the jaw going back.
looks more like a female, but still very very masculine.
What you need to do is bring her entire face, from the cheekbones down, up to her lower eyelid. If you want her to look feminine, you should also soften the bridge of her nose and let it blend more softly into her face, and make her eyes a little larger. Just don't go anime-big. you also need to soften her cheeks a bit, right now they sink in a little much.
[EDIT:]
just saw your reference image. ...looks a lot like a dude. Maybe that's part of the issue.
Also, yeah, there should be a much more extreme shape between the base of the head and the neck.
Okay so for texturing here is my favorite, most simple yet most efficient tip : work with your model/renders against a white background! Or, very very bright/blue. It will force you to pick better, striking colors. No cheating possible!!
And for the facial proportion : overlay some 2D or 3d skull refs!
I will also agree on the face looking a bit manish. I agree with natetheartist on the fix for the face, making the face shorter with more subtle plane changes to the bone structure will translate this to a more female look. Girls faces for the most part have very elegant plane changes compared to males. In my opinion her looking the way she looks now resemble a transvestite (most have horse like faces, I know from living in downtown San Francisco for 6 years and there are trannies all over the place ), not to be mean at all, it's the first thing I thought of, maybe it's just me.
natetheartist has a great paintover there, and Mr.Skull face hits on some good points with the feature softness, soften up the nose and cheeks, it should be a big step in the right direction! also you might try makin her eyes just a tiny tiny bit bigger than the standard head width/5.
I know you wanted to be done with the model, but I think what everyone's mentioned can be fixed pretty easily in the low poly and normal map. For the simplest shit, maybe you could try something like this
texturing looks good so far, but it's basically a solid color. Try adding makeup and color variation or whatever
Replies
Your nose imo needs to be a bit smaller, jaw rounder... lower half of the head should be smaller in general, eyes look like theyre up WAY too high to me, and cranium could be a little smaller once the eyes are fixed.
Again, im trying to make it look more recognisably female here.. as to whether it's more or less realistic or "correct" is anyone's guess
Best advice at the moment is show the reference you're going from. That will make her easier to crit.
Best off the cuff crits are:
Jaw is to large/long. If you move the chin, jawline and lips up about the space of her eye socket she'll start to look more feminine,
A little more definition between skull and neck on the back wouldn't hurt. Eyes are spaced a bit far apart, but not terribly out of alignment.
Cheekbones could be raised a bit to make the eye socket seem less droopy/sleepy.
The other thing to remember is that human heads have a range of form and there are many a woman who, just in the face at least, could be mistaken for a man if they wore a buzzcut and no makeup.
A lot of what makes a girl feminine has more to do with presentation and personality than it does structure of her face.
was going to add this myself, but you ninja'd it before i got a chance to. So, seconded!
Also try to control the eyelids more. You got a perfectly symmetrical almond eyelid outline - something you really need to avoid.
I really like the side view tho. Looks like an ex GF, kinda!
...sorry...
@ vailias: i know about the presentation thing, it's always tricky because i never quite know what style hair i'd like to see on a model until i can visualise the face how i want it. but at the same time a face doesn't look quite right without hair
@pior: sorry to dig up old wounds :P
now for a more technical request: what can i change to make the eyelids "work"?
-Jawline, female jawline is much smoother than the male one from the front view.
-The lower half of the face is a little too big.
-The nose could be narrower.
-Eyes are too far apart.
-Eyes could benefit from a more defined shape.
-The nose could start from a higher point and have a smoother yet deeper concave curve from the side view.
I'm actually trying to paint what I say, I'll post if I get something useful.
EDIT: arghh I type so slowoly you posted an update before I finished my post
your eyes are on a region that is modeled too flat. when i look at the side view, i should be able to see the profile of the eye ball, in this case im cant see it. look at references, especially 3/4 view. look at wireframe views of other models and study.
also the upper skull is too narrow.
good luck!
- the eyes sit too high and they look upside down. (in the last picture)..
- the earlobe could be rounder
- ears are somewhat flat...don't make her jug ears...but something inbetween...
- the forehead could be smoother, especially over the eyes
- the transition between the jaw and the neck should be smoother
overall I think the eyes are the bigggest issue right now...but at least she looks more female than male and with some hair it should be obvious
I tried to keep the general look (more masculine jaw, lower jaw, high eyes, big curving heart shaped face style cheeks) but conform it more to anatomical rules. Deviations from the normal proportions need to be subtle, a little goes a long way.
http://i48.tinypic.com/i74ups.jpg
Your problem with the eyes is that your eyes are warping upwards at the outside -- like a reverse melting. The top lid should come downwards to meet the bottom lid on the outside, and then fold over -- the bottom lid does NOT draw upwards like a curtain. Additionally, the eye wraps outward along the skull a bit. The orbital cavity is big and squareish, and deeper on the outside (where the cheekbone forms its border) than it is on the inside. Fleshy bits have to fill that hole.
The eyes, then! If I'd have to make a guess, it is that the eye balls are simply too big. It's a bit hard to tell on such a model, of course, but I think they're bigger than actual eyes - which are quite small, actually, when you touch them (closing your eyelids before feeling the size of your eyes is recommended). If you were to scale them down, the end of the eyelids on the outer side would be positioned more to the back, which I think they need to be (and that would also allow you to make the forehead rounder, another thing that I think would help). On the inner side, the eye lids don't even follow the eye ball anymore at some point, but the tear ducts. Look at the huge gap that Slipgatecentral has here because he doesn't have tear ducts.
These are just two cents. I don't think the femininity is all that much of an issue here. I think it looks female, and real women would be much harder to recognise without hair, eye lashes, make-up and breasts too.
i added some hair to emphesise the "woman" side. and ofc changed the eyes somewhat, along with general tweaks to her overall features.
i'll think about changing the nose, but my girlfriend told me not to (and no it's not a reprisentation of her).
thanks for the help so far guys, keep it coming
The shape of your eyes are much better, but the ends of them are resting on the same line. I've pulled the tear duct down, and the ends of the eyelid pulled up. Fairly minor bits, as they could be a racial feature to some.
The big thing that bothered me was the orientation of the eyeballs. You've got them low and crossed. I've moved them out a little more, and up a considerable way. To me it makes the eyes appear more relaxed.
Darkening the iris & pupils would be a good shift towards being a human female, too.
anywho... i feel like maybe the eyes could be bigger and a little closer together?
oh shit. thats great lmao
It's very important to study faces in other angles than just side and front..
Looks a tad freakish, like that chick.
soapbox, but i really hate posts like this.
It's way easier to make people with character but weird anatomy than it is to make people (especially women) with no character but solid, ideal anatomy. If this is an exercise, which it seems to be, it's really worth trying to make her a least fairly pretty. No reason to make her a super boring stepford wives type but at least hit some of the basic markers of ideal beauty. 'she has character!' isn't a valid excuse for shoddy anatomy. Once you get past the challenge to draw/paint/model more ideal men and women it's very easy to variate.
With a little more work (which i'm sure Gir is putting in) this model could have character and looks and anatomy.
And, on that note: I think the brow is a bit too soft and high, but only barely. On a Caucasian woman's brow i'm expecting it to be strong enough to shadow the eyes a bit, but obviously don't lose the rounded, womanly arc to it.
Additionally, i'm not buying the nose. It's a weird combination of flat and Caucasian and wide that doesn't really look right to me. More of a fakey cg vibe than an interesting anatomy vibe. The 'wings' of the nostrils seem too splayed out. I'd pull the edges in a bit more and narrow it into slightly more of a \_/ shape from the top. It looks awesome from the profile though.
and good argument SupRore :P
ok, so in this update i:
made the eyes bigger
brought the eyes inward and down a little
plumped out the lips, but only a little
tried to define the cheek bones a little more
from the front, her lips remind me of Famke Jannsen...
the point of this project is to try and make something generic. while i'm using references of course, i'm not focusing on any one particular reference, and trying to steer away from any likenesses. i think it's going well, however without trying to make it look like someone, it sometimes doesn't even look human at all... weird.
For instance, when you're in a life drawing session, there aren't several models that you choose bits and pieces from. You focus on that subject for several hours and render them to the best of your abilities. In the process, you develop an eye for generic anatomy, but you also realize the features that make each face unique. Rinse and repeat.
When you become skilled enough to rely less on reference, then you can accurately 'fill in' these unique features on your own. You aren't at this point yet. So it does look somewhat alien and abstract, because 99% of people do not look like this. Some people do, and you think "huh, they look kinda strange," but that's not your target when studying anatomy.
You're improving, keep it up.
bit of a late update... totally revisited the proportions, moved the eyes around, tried to plump up the lips a bit, adjusted the nostrils etc...
It looks "delight" now. So it fits better to a woman, the female before was to harsh.
so thats a lot beetter.
The furrow under the cheekbone at the side looks a little overly defined.
If your new version still has the neck muscles laid out in the same fashion as the previous image, you need to have a look at how the neck joins the back of the skull.
She's still got teensy tiny ears.
You're getting there mate. Just a few more tweaks and you'll have something nice.
I have some crits for you but keep in mind that I´m not an expert myself. :poly121:
The face seems to lack depth, the space between the ear and the eye is very big.
The nose is very thin and the face all around has a lot of sharp edges I think you need to soften it up a bit.
The neck needs to connect to the back of the skull.
The ear seems to be too small.
The eyes are very close together and high.
The face seems to be too long.
Sloppy paintover:
Jackablade and slaught make good points.
There are a few places where extrusions/depressions in the face are a bit over-defined and bulbous. To a degree this is a matter of taste, but at least on the cheekbone it definitely needs fixing. The issue is that you're cutting cavities in where you only need a transition from plane to plane. You can use a careful low power flatten brush to do this easily, or r3.5 has these 'mpolish' and 'hpolish' brushes that are basically super subtle subtractive clay brushes that are perfect for this kind of fix.
Also, i hate to crit another (generally awesome) paintover, but i want to point out a slight error in slaughts that's also kindof relevant to your model as is. In my first post i sortof cryptically wrote 'cheek goes behind brow, in front of jaw' -- what i meant was a little (and i think pretty important) note about the structure of the head.
It's a common mistake to see the outer end of the brow terminating at about the same place as the cheekbone and them kindof meeting in a point -- this is wrong. Take one look at a skull and you'll see that the brow stops pretty shallow on the face, whereas the cheekbone (specifically the Zygomatic arch) runs all the way back to the ear. Now, you don't want to cut out and overdefine this, skin and muscle and fat softens the area up to the point of the actual lines of the arch being almost irrelevant, but you've got to keep it in mind for the way the orbital cavity and cheekbone interact -- avoid that '>' shape meeting between the brow and the cheekbone. There's a > ish meeting between the brow and the face itself, but it's not as wide as the zygomatic arch, and then cheekbone runs back behind and outside of it.
which means i've baked down the normals (although i'm going to be redoing the lowpoly ear very soon).
the bake seems to have gone really smoothly and shouldn't need much (if any) photoshopping. texturing is fail as usual from me, but at least she looks somewhat female :P
keep the crits coming, would love to know what to change =]
edit: quickfix on the eyes.
Some of my former crits still stand tho.
Not every woman looks the same but your gal feels a little off.
It looks good from the front but the profile needs some work.
Here´s some reference from my folders:
Keep it up dude!
how's this? i've altered the bridge of the nose, made the tip rounder, rounder her lips a little as well, brought the ears in somewhat...
lots of small changes =]
Also, try to capture the style you want on pen and paper first - it will give you something to compare against.
Good luck!
anyway, testing a hair style
What you need to do is bring her entire face, from the cheekbones down, up to her lower eyelid. If you want her to look feminine, you should also soften the bridge of her nose and let it blend more softly into her face, and make her eyes a little larger. Just don't go anime-big. you also need to soften her cheeks a bit, right now they sink in a little much.
just saw your reference image. ...looks a lot like a dude. Maybe that's part of the issue.
Also, yeah, there should be a much more extreme shape between the base of the head and the neck.
And for the facial proportion : overlay some 2D or 3d skull refs!
-Woog
texturing looks good so far, but it's basically a solid color. Try adding makeup and color variation or whatever