After weeks of working on a realistic head... its done!
here's the workflow break down
So first thing I had to do was pick someone's head to model. So I picked Scarlett Johansson because if your going to spend countless hours studying someone's head, why not pick a good looking head. Another thing that I thought was that it would be more of a challenge to make something beautiful since it doesn't matter if there's a flaw on a guys face. The last reason is because the day after we where assigned the project I got an awesome deal at Walmart on a blue ray copy of the Avengers.
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| reference images |
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| more reference images |
I took anatomical figure drawing last winter so I did a lot of drawings of muscle and skeletal structures which helped a lot. One of the problems I came across while sculpting the head was understanding the characteristics that make the sculpture recognizable especially without color or hair. I practiced sketching her to try and understand her facial features that separate her from others. I also haven't had as much experience with females in my art so making the head look famine was also a priority; I remember my professor calling my model with male pronouns during one of the lectures.
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| quick sketch |
So I was new to Mudbox and I thought the program was pretty cool since you can just sculpt away with essentially 3 tools (scultp, smooth, and grab) without having any technical skills. Most of the lectures where about ascetics but that was fine to me since you can learn the technical stuff online and being more artistic and understanding detail is more important in this field since technology changes and they could just pay some foreigner less to do grunt modeling. During this process I learned a couple good workflows, like in Mudbox I would take an image and project it on top of my model and sort of just trace it for accurate porportions. I watched a couple tutorials on Mudbox sculpting and learned to use the wax tool with different fall offs along with the pinch and flatten tool for certain effects.
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| checking Mudbox proportions with Photoshop |
After the sculpting the head we had to send it to 3D Coat, another program I had yet to use. I learned a lot about topology and edge flow. I actually came to really like the program as well as mapping, to me it was kind of like a puzzle game to me since I tried pretty hard to get a really low poly count.
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| Front Edge Flow Plan |
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| Quarter Edge Flow Plan |
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| Profile Edge Flow Plan |
After doing the topology, which I actually did about twice after an in class critique, I did the UV layout. We had this kind of eventful lecture where 3 other people did speed lectures on UVs and how to lay them out. I really liked the one method where you use 3D coat and can finish the UV's in about 7 minutes. Hiding the UV strategically was another part of the thing you had to worry about. I decided that I would try and make hair so I quickly modeled a base mesh in Maya and sculpted it in Mudbox, I didn't care about the topology at this point due to time and other classes so I just went straight to the UVs for it.
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| Side Topology |
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Topology of the Front
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| back of the sculpture |
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| Ear/Side Topology |
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| UV layout for head |
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| UV layout for neck |
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| UV for the hair |
After dealing with all the technical stuff it was back to sculpting for me. I would post images of my sculpture on Facebook or show my friends and see if my model was recognizable or not and they would say things, sometimes painfully blunt that sometimes helped me when they where not trolling me. After re sculpting you turn that mesh into a normal map and apply it to your base mesh to have a low poly count. So after weeks of studying these images and trying to reproduce them in a sculpture, here are the renders. Besides doing the hair as extra I also decided to try and texture, I found a nice video on how to take an image and project it in Mudbox to paint on the sculpture.
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| base mesh |
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| Wire Frame and Poly count |
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| Normal Maps Applied |
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| Textured |
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| Mudbox Screen Shot |
So in conclusion I learned a lot from this class, especially out of class when I tried to learn new things to improve my head model and take it a step higher. The workflow, a few new programs, a little bit on characteristics/proportions/anatomy, and also a new portfolio piece. In the future I will probably be able to do this again but a ton faster; I am also interested in learning ZBrush since it seems like its a more flexible program than Mudbox. Another thing that I didn't mention was that while I was doing this I was also doing a character I designed using the same workflow. See a short reel I put together of it on my portfolio site, PhanManCG.com
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