Male vs Female Skull Features
This is an exercise to highlight the different features present in Male and Female skulls. In this exercise I have labelled the Slope of the Frontal Bone (Yellow) , the Superciliary Arches (Green), Mental Eminence (Purple), and Gonial Angle (Red).
General Skull Features
Here I label the general features of the skull, showing Bone (Red), Muscle (Yellow), Cartilage (Purple), and Miscellaneous features (Green).
Testing Out Making Monsters
This was a quick exercise at the end of the lesson just to practice what we’ve learned in the class so far. We were told to make some sort of monster so I just went for uncanny features to make something in the time we had.
Nasal Features
During this exercise, we labelled the features of the nose to come back to as a reference when attempting to build up noses on ZBrush in the future. Some angles have been marked in the diagram as they are important to try and replicate.
Attempting to Create my Own Noses
These are the two noses I made to get used to moving the camera around and building up the nasal structure with the Standard Brush and the Move Tool. There was some use of the DamStandard brush too, but very little. On my next nose I will try to include all of the angles in the structure labelled above, and I would like to make it look more like skin than clay by adding the folds and creases that a nose would normally have.
Creating a Third Nose at Home
We were tasked to create another nose, combining what we had learned in class. For this third nose I focused on creating the right shape as it was something I had struggled with for the entire session. In the end I am pretty happy with the shape of the nose, though it could use some more asymmetry and the side view is a little rough.
The Structure of the Ear
Creating my own ears
My first ear was a bit of a test run where I roughly sculpted a bit of everything to try and understand the structure of the ear.
In the second model, I focused more on creating the top of the Helix and trying to get the curl on the inside correct.
For this third model, I finished off the Helix, then started work on sculpting the front of the ear. From here I will think about where to place the ear hole in the next model.
This is the last ear that I made in class, it is missing the Tragus but my focus was on bringing everything together for the upper and middle parts of the ear.
The Sculpture of the Eye
Creating an Eye
From Scratch
In this method, you create an eye from scratch and use the “ClayBuildUp” tool to create a face around the eye. This allows you to have complete freedom with the facial shape and structure, but is also much more difficult as you have nothing to work off of.
Anime Head Method
An easier way to make eyes is to use the default anime head, then dig in to the face to place eye balls in. From there you can build up the features off of the head as you see fit instead of having to work from scratch with nothing to work off of.
Creating an Eyeball in Maya
Creating and Expressing a Face
In this first picture, I hollowed out the eye hole, shaped it a little and added in some definition around the eye socket. This was achieved through use of the “DamStandard” tool and the “Move” tool mainly, with some use of the “Standard” tool.
This second picture shows my progress. Through use of the “ClayBuildup” tool, I added in some placeholder eyes and created more definition in the face, adding in some wrinkles, a proper nose, and superciliary arches.
With this final progress report, I added some expression to the face through the “Move” and “ClayBuildup” tools mainly. I didn’t have much idea for what to use as my base for the expression, so I went for a raised eyebrow, inspired by The Rock.
Fat Stores
Subcutaneous Fat – The fat under the skin, all over your body. As someone gains weight, the fat will gather in some places more than others. It is not uniform. This is shown in places like the stomach.
Structural Fat Pads – These are deeper fat collections that either help the bones to slide around or are structural collections that push the muscles out. This is shown in the diagrams below, highlighting fat stores in green.
Orbital Fat Pads can show age through how sunken they are, an older person will have more sunken fat under the eyes. This creates a fold in the face, visible in the image below.
Buccal Fat is located on either side of the face, around the masseter. These fat pads will give you chipmunk cheeks if they store a lot of fat. Once Buccal fat is removed, it does not return.
Diagram of Fat Deposits
Head Texturing – ZBrush
Head Texturing – Maya Render
Head Texturing – Image projection, ZBrush
Maya Workflow
Villain Moodboard
For my villain, I want to include sharp features and a sort of “infected” look. To help myself with this, I have chosen characters for my mood board that either have very sharp and stylised features (Maleficent, Captain Amelia and SCP-096) or have been infected somehow (Salem, Cregg, Tetsuo, Silko and Venom).
Creating a Villain
Day one was focussed on creating a general face shape, I struggled starting with a regular sphere to create a face off of, so I chose a 20 sided die and slowly added more polygons while moving them to create the general shape of the face. After this I created the baseline shape and tried to create the “sharp” features I’m looking for.
For day two, I fixed the nose to look a little closer to what I’m looking for, making it thinner and longer instead of wider and shorter. I flattened out the eyebrows a little and defined the lips a little more.
Heading in to day three, I realised that the reason the face was “off” when I was trying to create sharp features is because the head was too wide, thinned it out and finally fixed the issue with the lips that was getting on my nerves. To achieve this I duplicated the model, used the zRemesher tool to retopologise the lips and then projected the features from the old high resolution model onto the new low resolution model. This created the face that I ended day three with.
Day four, I really sharpened out the features, some of the biggest things being adding a jaw, sucking the cheeks in some more for the “drug addict” effect, and pushing the middle of the eyebrows down a bit to create a more angry look. I also fixed the mouth a bit to create more of the crescent shape that I am looking for in a bite. Next on my list is to add a neck and eyes before adding the outright villainous features.
These two days were spent making the shoulders and adding in the eye sockets. The shoulders were simply made through a combination of the clay buildup tool, dam standard tool and the move tool.
For today, I re-added the “angry eyebrows” and defined the shoulders a little more, as even someone presenting as weak has neck muscles. I’ve made the face look a little more human, and I’ve done my best to pull in the cheeks without removing bone structure from the face.
In this final update, I added hair, textured the skin and posed the face for exporting to maya. After doing this and taking screenshots my computer ran out of storage and my hard drive corrupted. The skin was created using the techniques we learned in Week 8, using a base coat and adding Yellow, Red and Blue areas to indicate cartilage / bone and blood flow respectively. This helps maya to render the skin more realistically so that light can diffuse through different areas correctly.