I’ve decided to finally get into making a human head with the right topology and rig it.
So, I’ve started with a base topology (without ears), went on to the sculpt and this is where I am right now, but before I move onto retopo this, I’d like to know if it’s right! I don’t want to have to go back and redo the whole thing once I’ve started going on.
I think the eyes need improvement but I can’t get it right in sculpt.
This might be a badass military veteran for example, so the face doesn’t need to be too expressive for a first try on human face animation.
Update: well I’ve began retopo.
Here is the result so far.
Advice is still appreciated as where I should go after that to add the detail from the sculpt to the retopo version.
This is my first time doing this so any advice would be helpful.
Overall its not bad. I think that in the sculpt you can still do some proportions and face structure work before doing details. If you don’t want to start over, you can probably just tweak them. Basically, I think his brow is too far out. He needs more of the cheekbone under his eye, as well as his eye needs to be in a cavity. The lower eyelid will still come up, but overall it should be further back in than the cheekbone. His mouth looks a little too low on his face. You can probably just bring his chin down a bit. Are you going to give him ears? Other than what I mentioned, it looks good. Especially the retopo. It looks like you got the flow down.
Particularly when you are working on topology, the wireframe modifier can help to show off what you have.
Looking at the faces I can make out in your mesh, it seems as if you have most of the loops in place. You might want to turn the loop that comes down off the brow back towards the nose just under the eye loop so that it forms a “mask” loop. Also, you might want a loop running from just under the nose to the bridge just inside the loop that comes from under the mouth to help define the nostrils.
I’ll admit I haven’t done much work for animation (in fact, I’m also rigging my first character), but the suggestions I’m making are based on what I’ve learned from some of the archived facial topology tutorials I watched a while back on CG Cookie.
@Scotchtapeworm Thank you for the advice! You’re right, I was having trouble with the eyes before I saw your message and it will help to add the cheekbone and have them back a little. I think it might be that his nose is a little small. Yes I have to add the ears (I should have added them to the sculpt, now I’m having a workflow problem but I’ll find a way) I’ll probably add more details through a handdrawn bumpmap ontop of the backed normal map.
@gradyp Yes I see what you mean! The mask loop I remember from blenderella I think, in this case I used a tutorial from CG arena that did it a little different, starting from the mouth, I’ll see how it turns out. Also you’re right the nostrils might need that loop. Thanks for the advice! I’ve seen your first character thread and it looks good!
it’s been a (very) long time but here’s an update:
I’ve added ears to the retopo model, also reworked the eyes, they have eylids with a shapekey (here the retopo has closed eyes)
On the picture you can see the original sculpt and the retopo.
Next step will be adding accentuating the cheekbones like I was advised (thanks again ScotchTapeWorm) finishing mouth and eyes, UV unwrap, baking the normal map, texture painting and bump map and spec map painting.
Well, it’s going slowly as I don’t have tons of time to work on it, but here is an update!
I just want to remind that I’m not aiming at photorealism, but I do want it to be coherent and to animate it.
What do you think?
(All textures have been handpainted, I used no photos)
next step: hair, eyebrows, beard!
Please please feel free to help and critisize, this is my first face ever. (in 3D I mean, I already got a face in the real world, thank god)
note: renders use transculent instead of SSS, hence the line on the profile render that looks like an UV error, it’s actually light passing through the mouth and interfering with transcluscency - but it saves render time for now
I think the ears are to small, and the forehead is still too far forward. Shouldn’t the creases coming from the edge of the mouth go straight to the nose instead of curving up to the eye? I really like the skin material so far.
Thank you GPS14!
I did make the ears bigger and brought the forehead back, and fixed the nostrils a little.
As for the crease coming from the mouth I think you’re right, and on the sculpt it’s really visible, however it doesn’t show that much with the lowpoly model with the normal map, so I’ll keep it that way as a mistake not to repeat in the future.
And now I just started playing with hair (very much in progress - and harder than I thought!)
I love where your head is going, but there are still some proportions issues. Luckily there is a lot of common ground between drawing and sculpting. Do some Googling on “Andrew Loomis” he’s an illustrator from years ago that all the comic book guys reference. And here’s a great video showing how to draw the proportions of the head in his style here:
Thanks paulchambers! Actually yeah, it seems so obvious now that you say it.
I’m gonna try shrinking the top of the head, bringing the nose down and the mouth a little up.
I really should have started on something with ref images, the reference I used in the first place were a from a female model.
I’m also looking forward to seeing the progress on your portrait thread!
That’s better. The proportions of the nose are right, but the whole thing is too small. The bottom should be about half way between the current bottom and the mouth, and then the mouth should be moved down. The forehead is much better, and the size of the ears are right, but the inside of the ear doesn’t seem too realistic. Good work on the hair so far.
Thanks for advice again GPS14, and Paulchambers, that really helped.
After tweaking proportions (the forehead was way too high), changing the ears a little, hair, eyelashes, brows, adding beard hair, tweaking eye material, I went kinda crazy with SSS and here is a render! It’s starting to get heavy on my computer and hard to work with.
Looking at the miniature image I can tell lots of things are wrong but it’s hard to see why. I might be getting close to the best I can do with this one model.
sorry for telling you this now, which is probably way too late. if you show this to someone with no CG background, i bet they’ll say: “yeah it’s alright, but there’s something still seems wrong about it”. and i reckon that the position of the ears are wrong. if you google human face, you can notice that all faces have the ear’s tips tend to align with the position of the eyes and the ear’s ends is align with the nostrils. so i think that small little detail that we hardly ever notice in life is now throwing away the realism of this model. there could be more to it, but that’s all i can reckon, i have little to none experience in modeling human.
maybe it’s too late to change this already, so sorry about that, didn’t see this topic earlier. the sculpt work as well as textures are well made.
And thank you Bill, that’s a really great tip, you’re absolutly right there is something wrong with it and the ears probably count for a big part. Although I can’t change them completly I’ll try to tweak them. This model is really to learn anyway so it’s ok if it’s not perfect in the end I really appreciate the advice!
I see far to much sss on the his right side, and the gloss on his left makes it look quite flat, or maybe it’s the lighting. I personally think it would be better with the ears sticking out more. I think the eye brow hairs are too short and too many, and there should be more hairs around the beard and mustache. The wrinkles in the forehead and below the eyes look more like scratches, and I think the nose is still too small. The eyelashes should be a bit darker, and the bags under his eyes look like cloth. You should inflate them a bit. The lips are a bit too pale also. The base of that tuft of hair on his forehead looks fake. I think It’s just a problem of not enough hairs, but the strands could also be too thin at the base. The eyes don’t look right together. The one on his right is dark, with lots of gleam, while his left eye is light, with very small, dim gleam. The parting line down his hair is too wide, too bald, and too skin colored. It should be a mix between that colour and a light, bluish-grey, as it is hardly ever hit by the sun. The hair looks too fluffy and smooth, and it might look better with some light hairs and some dark hairs. The eye white needs a slightly less flat looking material. Also try to make the parts that hit the sun a lot darker and redder, and the rest lighter. Are you using a multires? if so, I think you should subdivide again to sculpt the details into the mesh instead of using displacement. I hope this was helpful, and good luck on your project.
Well I’ve done some deep tweaking thanks to you guys.
The ears look way way better now in my opinion, also some artifacts have appeared which will be corrected.
Using and hdri made a huge, huge difference and completly solved some issues.
The hair probably needs some work, and the eyebrows have an issue too but nothing too serious imo.
GPS14 all that was so so useful! I tried to correct all of that. Unfortunatly I’m not using the multires which was a big mistake from the start, but I’ll have to leave it that way. I agree about the scratches, I drew them directly on the bump map, I’ll try to improve them.
The eyes use the same material but the lighting was the issue, also I added a texture for the white and reduced the glossy.
Still need to animate it, if it’s good enough I’ll prob drop 5 or 10 seconds of it in my demoreel.
It’s looking much better! I think the gloss on the lip looks plastic, and the eyebrow hairs should be almost a centimeter long each. The sss is perfect, and most of the other things I stated are looking good. The crease between the eyebrows looks weird though.
I really appreciate the advice!