The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Sketchbook: Melomad
polygon
Hello, I'm Arzel from France! I've been lurking the forum and decided to get my stuff out there.
Right now, I'm building my portfolio and I'm trying to get good enough at what I do to lend me a job. I do 3D and 2D art, I'm contributing to the Beyond Skyrim: Morrowind mod and the amazing people there really helped me 
Here's a set of temple bells I did for the mod, I'm quite proud of it! However, I am and always will be open to critique. Huzzah!
Replies
I chose to represent a local breed, the Breton horse (specifically the 'postier' subtype), as I haven't seen a lot of working horses in games / online. Horses are hard to get right because they bear the selective breeding curse which makes a lot of them fucked up, like pugs. In the case of the Breton horse, the 'trait' subtype has long ceased to be bred for manual labor and is instead bread dumb and heavy to maximize meat production.
With my postier, I hope to create a cute horse with good conformations and train my anatomy at the same time
On the horse I'd say it currently feels too front-heavy in terms of weight/proportions.
Keep it up
I think a good place to start is to imagine the skull under all the layers of skin, fat, sinew and muscle, and how all of that hangs by gravity and is bound together. You can also try adding basic colours; add in some placeholder skin colour and especially colour the pupils and eye area, the pupils are a 'landmark' and the more landmarks you can identify, the faster you can pull together accurate proportions. The concept of your sculpt is stylized, but stylized art still conforms to a number of IRL rules.
Try to get a copy of Anatomy for Sculptors, that helped me a lot
The eyebrow arch could also use some variation, for a more extreme example of hollow inner corner and regular outer corner look up Jessica Chastain without makeup.
It depends a lot for what amount of stylization and shading you're going for, but I think you style lends itself well to this kind of anatomical detailing. You could also sharpen the ear structure, areas with cartilage or bone like the transition of the nose bridge and it'd look very good. It'd also be a small step ahead than a lot of character art out there because people tend to overlook this kind of sharper x rounder rhythm. Think about Disney's guidelines of curves and lines, it's the same spirit but instead of silhouettes you're thinking about planes. Done with intent this is also stylization.
You're doing a really good job of translating from 2D to 3D by the way, and your style is lovely! "The Chronicle of Western Costume" is staring at me from my desk, so I'm also greatly enjoying the costume. 😄
Edit: I took so long to type this up he answered too and I 100% agree about layering and attention to details!
It seems you overworked the hollow above the eye a little - it dominates the whole area a bit too much?
It also helps me think of the of the fatty area (blue on the picture) going around the eyelid and "behind" the orange hollow (not into the eyebrow)
Well, when I compare it to this (by Anatomy for Sculptors): https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RYQNWy
I kinda interpret this hollow as very exaggerated region between fat and eyelid (yellow area, not even shows in my picture, so I realize my mistake now). In case of your reference it looks (to me) like the fatty area goes around the eyelid and all the way down to the inner corner.
But then another model from them reads closer to what you're doing: https://anatomy4sculptors.artstation.com/projects/ba46KG
Sorry, I don't mean to add to confusion ^^'
And it gets worse because to bake textures you'll want to have a semi-closed eye variant of the sculpt to avoid self-intersection baking errors.
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Since we're talking about eyes, here are some elements which are very useful to know so you know what look for in references. There are more orbital fat pads than one ones highlighted here, but the mentioned ones are visible on the surface while the missing ones are part of a kind of deep fat bed that supports and protects the eyeball and doesn't matter for sculpting and drawing.
Welcome to polycount's eye anatomy crash course! 😎
Temporal fat pad
I'd also like to point out the eyes angle. The canthus don't sit flat on faces, they follow the skull which is sort of round, so the medial canthus is more forward than the lateral canthus. Some people will have medial and lateral canthus pretty much on a line, but they're outliers, and it's always a good idea to create an outlier character on purpose, not by accident.