Character Short

raven5326

Hey all,

I started this project in order to do a couple things.

1: Take a character from concept to animation
2: Create a full facial rig


I am in the modeling phase now and I am still messing with alot of the shapes to try to match the concept a little more.

Any advice or guidance is more than welcome, this will be the first character i have fully modeled.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27846893@N04/6534402215/

walkonsky

The topology of the face looks good to me. You could show a shot from the front without hair, however. Its much easier to see, then.

The proportions of the face however are not very realistic. Unless you are going for a very stylized look, you should gather some reference images and work on the proportions. At the moment the eyes are very big, the face very broad and the lips too thin.

I am absolutely no expert for modelling hair, but i think your approach is at least quite uncommon I dont think that you will be able to get good results if you completely divide the hair in two parts like this.
In case you are in fact going for a more realistic look, you would probably want to add some planes with alpha textures to layer strains of hair for a more volumetric look. However, the proportions are by far a bigger thing to work at in this case.

jmt

At this point, I would recommend modeling from someone else's concept, or better yet from 3dsk style real life reference images. Using your own drawing isn't helping you right now. You've got some strange proportions (the eyes and mouth especially).

raven5326

Hey Guys,

Thanks for posting! I should probably rewind a bit and give some back story on some of the design choices of the concept art itself.


Here is some of the reference i am using for the model and the concept art.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27846893@N04/6547079087/in/photostream


As you can see i am basing the style on pixar and dreamworks, using the cartoony characters as a baseline and pushing some of the elements to fit the characters specific personality


The eyes i wanted to push the lower lids farther down towards the nose to deform the general eye shape.

I wanted to give the jaw a harder line to reflect her personality a bit more, juxtaposed with the rest of her rounded features I wanted to convey the conflicted way she views the world.

I wanted to keep the almond shape of the eyes, but decided to keep the tear duct to again hint at the "ridged" view she has of the world.

This project is largly to see if I can hit the concept in 3d style, then push it farthur by creating a short once line that i have created for her.

The aim for the rigging and the animation is pixar\dreamworks quality, i will be creating some blendshapes, but will most likely be relying on a base bone deformation rig driven by nurbs surfaces that will deform.



So that is the low down on where i am going with the project.

From what I have seen mostly hair for non-realtime is done using plugins like "Shave and a haircut", or the maya hair system. I am thinking that i will go for a more solid look and rely on a shader to break up the highlights in to strands. I may have to go revisit it in the end, but that is the plan for now.