3D Reflective Journal #4 - Finishing Face Model

 

3D Reflective Journal #4 (+ Feedback)

My first progress was mainly wrapping faces around the back of the head in order to form the basis for creating the scalp and everything behind the face. Similar to previous weeks, this involved spending a lot of time in different orthographic views and in perspective view ensuring that the curvatures looked decent and believable.

Next I extruded downwards and started forming the chin and filling in everything below and around the mouth. You can see me in the process of lining up faces in the screenshot below.

This is what it looked like when that basic shape outline was formed:

And this is when the whole face other than the nose and mouth had been filled in. I took some time to pause adding in new faces at this stage, and to adjust topology, edge flow, and proportions before moving on (as these things become harder to fix down the line):

Next, I worked on implementing the mouth and nose into the relevant places. 

I feel that the head model is shaping up to look very comparable to the reference head in the production bible, and the adjustments should not have to be too severe. Primarily I think that the face of our provided character is a little 'taller' and the nose sits a little higher. I feel that it is working well having a reliable reference up until this stage, but I definitely do feel like it will be a slight challenge moving away from that in the near future and adding completely new features such as the character's unique hair. Next I will finish up the back of the head, create a neck joint (with 8 edges) and do the ears, before moving on to do the hair.

Group status:

Gabriella is tracking along well with creating the body base mesh (it is essentially finished) and is about ready to move onto accessories. Max is currently sick unfortunately, but has apparently finished the majority of the vehicle. Mila has said she has been doing a little bit of work on creating a little diorama for the character to stand on, but I haven't received any imagery/follow up about that. Overall, progress seems good but I will need more communication from my group mates going forwards, so I will need to message them a little more frequently, as my messages sometimes go ignored. Gabriella meets me in person and shows me her progress every week which is great, it just more the other two. It is important that I don't allow things to coast until the last minute when everything needs to be assembled. If there are tasks that are far behind at all, I need to be aware so that they can be re-allocated/done myself.

Feedback

I got feedback from both Sylvain and Oana this week. I first asked about my head shape overall, and was advised to essentially flatten the forehead a lot (make it come to less of a sharp point around the bridge of the nose) as can be seen a bit in some previous screenshots, as it looked unnatural. This is the slight difficulty about not having a top reference, but using common sense it isn't way too difficult to fill in something reasonable. I was also encouraged to make the forehead taller/larger in general - I had made it a bit too small, which I think was a misjudgement on my part based on there being no hair to cover the scalp/top of the forehead. In terms of the new nose and mouth, I was just told to make sure the indents for the nostrils and lips were clear and sharp, so that the shapes could be read clearly and didn't look too soft/lacking in depth.