Head sculpture from pixologic

Sculpting A Human Head Overview

This method starts from a sphere,which isn't something I have necessarily grown comfortable with, but after seeing this, I am considering giving it another quick try. the main useful thing I drew from this is the screen shots of the progress of the sculpt with the next step in terms of proportions and features.

I am really going to try to put this to use in order to solidify my understanding of facial anatomy.

A quick note

I know I have fallen behind on blog posts; as mentioned before, I hit a little bit of a rough spot in life, but I am not going to let that stop me from completing my responsibilities.  So I am slowly posting all of my findings and progress retroactively. I will be up to date in a few days, as I feel the need to make sure this catalogs the entire process to these projects. Pardon if any of this seems boring or way too late.

Production Pipeline: Reference Shots

 In order to initiate this project, I needed to pick a room to create the visualization off of. I am no interior designer, so I wanted to leave those ideas up to the experts. I looked through the website for Architechtural Digest, and quickly found this space in Washington D.C. from the February 2011 issue in an article titled "Capital Improvement".

Center view of the fireplace

Long shot of the space

Shot of the stairs

Room next to the main room

The link to the full gallery can be found here (note: I have had a hard time trying to open the slide show in Firefox, you might have to try internet explorer.)

I will mainly be focusing on the room with the stairs in it, but will build the second room in order to add more possible shots afterward.

Sculpting Project Plans

So, after conversations with my professor, My plan has been to now shift gears and to push towards a final male and female head. My main focus will be to finish one head to completion, but if i can I will attempt to tackle a second one before the end of the quarter. I have chosen two celebrities to use as reference in order to create my male and female heads:

Anne Hathaway

Morgan Freeman

These arent my main reference images, they are just to show who these people are. I am going to work towards completing the female sculpt first.

Sculpting: Gestural Sculpting

I know this blog has been somewhat void of updates for a while now. I hit a small bump in life, but updates will be more constant from now on out.

So, from my most recent post about the sculpture project. As mentioned before I completely scrapped the previous syllabus of doing 5 weeks of multiple speed sculptures. I am obviously still working towards efficiency, but now I am aiming more towards actual anatomical accuracy and correctness. I would rather do things right than do them fast and wrong. Also the matte painting is now eliminated from the schedule. I really want to get this right. More on my plans for the future of this project in a separate post. For now, I will bring things up to date.

I have been looking at this much like the little bit of drawing I have done in my life; I have been attempting to do some basic sculpts just to get a feel of how to appropriate the form of the face properly onto my base. I remember in my anatomical drawing class (and in the one drawing class I took before that) they would constantly have us begin class by doing gestural drawing in order to warm up. Gestural drawing can be simply defined as quick, loose drawing where you are meant to block out the basic form of an object quickly and simply. I decided to follow through my initial sculpting attempts like this because placing the masses of the face proportionally is by far my largest struggle. All the projects I have done in ZBrush so far I have started with a base mesh, that had the mass laid out. Adding detail is something I am accustomed to, I just need to learn to shape out the face proportionally for now.

So to start, I decided to do a few experiments. These are in no particular order.

One of my initial attempts at just positioning everything

Just concentrating on the lips, a big problem area for me

Another attempt, more lipwork, still poor proportions

A better attempt of capturing the mass from a side view, much more proportionate

A complete exaggeration of the placement of mass on the face, as an exersize and just to get a feel for things

A strong focus on proportions, focusing on the shape of the head And being very minimal with the details

These are my initial experiments and quick gestural sculpts. Since I lack experience when it comes to these things they took me considerably longer than a 5 minute gestural drawing, but I believe theyre a step in the right direction.