Week 16 - Modelling A Female Head & Life Drawing

Modelling A Female Head

Following on from the female body model, it was time for me to practice making a female head. I used the provided reference drawings for the head, which shown views from various angles such as the front and side. I just needed to make the most of these when modelling it, so that this head made sense and looked fairly believable from different angles.

I've encountered problem in the most crucial stages of modelling, like when describing all the small indentations and bumps in the head (eye sockets, mouth etc). It was very easy to make these wrong. I've spent a fair amount of time on just adjusting verts and edges in those areas.

Another thing I learned here was that compared to the rest of the body, the head is usually more detailed in games. My head model had a larger triangle count for it's size, compared to its body. This additional detail level would allow the character to portray more detailed facial animations and emotions.

Surprisingly, I needed to spend a lot more time on the head than I originally thought. I guess this was due to my inexperience and lack of knowledge in this area of modelling at the time. I am still not fully satisfied with the end result. I aim to become faster in these areas by spending more time on practice of modelling of natural/organic shapes in 3DS Max.

Aside from the model, I have done some comparing of game characters. It was to see how crucial the head-to-body ratio was for a characters appearance adn silhouette. A character like Nathan Drake was roughly 7.5 heads, it gives him that extra bit of realism and makes him look natural/real. The Medic from Team Fortress 2  though has a higher ratio of roughly 9 heads which in turn makes him more stylised and less realistic. He almost looks heroic with his chunky and enlarged body parts.

Life Drawing

This week I was again badly timing my sketching, but it has still improved on my previous week's work as most of the sketches were almost completed this time. I really liked how the "not looking"warm up sketch turned out, I felt that I managed to describe the model better than I thought I could, when not looking at my paper/sketchbook. There was a mistkae on the final drawing, I dre the head too close to the left as I measured incorrectly  so I needed to redraw it later. I didn't want to fix this area straight away, as I may have been dragged into it for too long and could have ended not drawing the rest of the body. I drew most of the body first and when I have a few seconds left at the end, I moved back to the head to try and draw a suggestion of it further to the right.