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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know I havent been updating this constantly, but since this has become a project involving a lot of reasearch, I thought it would be better to compile all my potential little posts into a weekly update, as to show a little more method between all the little parts. We'll just consider the last post before this to be a resource I posted for everyone.
So, to begin: the main purpose of this project is to improve my skills within ZBrush while emphasizing efficiency. As seen by the syllabus I posted before, my plan was to crank out several different speed sculpts, and have a few different pieces done by the end of these 5 weeks. Turns out, in making this syllabus, I forgot one key piece of the puzzle: it takes time to get good at things. With my experiences so far working on this and researching since the beginning of the quarter, I am refurbishing the syllabus to be geared towards becoming fairly proficient in making a human head, male or female, and then shave my time of creation down as much as possible.
So initially, I started with trying to find any sort of secrets to give me direction in how to be fast at sculpting in general. I ended up rewatching a bunch of videos I had seen before of speed sculpting by Joe Pikop, off of his website, So Much Monsters. While giving me an eye into the ideas and the process, this didn't give me too much of an idea on how to go fast.
But in watching videos off of his website, there is actually a few recordings where you can see all of his interface. This is due to the fact that he didn't use the build in ZBrush recorder, as it wouldn't catch him switching into other programs. His interface, being highly customized, gave me the idea to turn my initial focus towards efficiency.
Initial UI configuration
Customized UI
Personally, I like a very minimal UI in any application I use., If there's a shortcut for it, I don't want a button for it, and if I use it often, there should be an accessible button for it. I still have much fine tuning left, but for now I have to see what works and what doesnt. My hope would be to push it as far as my firefox browser has gone:
Everything is set up in such a fashion that I can do everything very quickly. The improvement is actually pretty large already, so we'll see where I can push it.
In looking around for more videos of speed sculpting, I found a few different methods. Some people start with spheres; this works out fine due to the fact that spheres in ZBrush are actually subdivided cubes, so pole pinching isn't too much of an issue. They mold the sphere into shape and then carve into it to form the head.
Some also start with a premade base mesh and sculpt up from there.
I initially started to follow the method detailed in my previous post; I wasn't too big of a fan of this method, due to the fact that one has to place details into position by sheer memory, with little to no method about it. And also the fact that the head shape would not have been sculpted until later on into the process. I came across this sculpting demo of a female bust, and from it I drew alot of ideas and techniques:
In this you can see the base she starts with; a featureless smooth head shape. I decided to try to recreate this after trying to just carve a face straight into a sphere and finding that I had a very hard time properly adding the mass of the shapes of the features of the face.
Time: ~15 mins.
Reproportioned
Front view of the reproportion
I have gone through a few attempts at sculpting in features, I will post then when they're slightly more polished. This ended up being a very long blog post. I will continue to add posts like this about once a week.
This is an article I read a long time back, but I came back to when this project came up while researching. Hopefully these ideas will be of assistance in the grand scale of things.
