BA2 - Zbrush Practice - Anotomy, Female Face.

For my second Zbrush practice, my goal was to create a Female face all from scratch. Since in my earlier experience with character modelling I have taken the easy way out and started off with a base mesh, I now wanted to create it all from scratch. In the industry you normally use base meshes to speed up the process but for me it's important that you know how to make it from scratch before you start taking such approaches. Since last time I sculpted a character I have learnt a lot when it comes to anatomy. Much of this is thanks to that I have been practising 2D Art, specificity portraits which have forced me into studying anatomy. It have helped a lot tho and now instead of just seeing it as a "Face" I now think more about the inside of the skin. Where the skull is, how the muscles inside look and moves. It have resulted in my faces looking a lot more realistic and accurate.

The most difficult thing I find with sculpting human faces rather than let's say a monster, is that since we are among people everyday we can a lot easier spot when something is anatomical incorrect on a human sculpt. Monsters doesn't need to be anatomically accurate at all and still look god, but if a human face is slightly incorrect it doesn't feel right. There for I noticed that when it comes to creating human faces there is a TON of polishing involved.

This time I did not make the same mistake as with my first practice and took a lot of screenshots during my process. I will now describe how I approached this Practice.

To start off with I looked up various reference pictures of female faces. I decided to base my sculpt on one of the pictures that really stuck with me when I created the Moodboard for Medusa. I didn't want to create a exact copy of the image since the point were to create a realistic looking face, but I did like the mood it was going for and used it more as a inspirational image.

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Medusa art by Zhao Jialin

To start off with what I did was to create the very basic shapes with Zspheres, when I was satisfied with the shapes I turned it into a Polymesh 3D and started sculpting. 

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When it got the silhouette right I gradually added more polygons and started refine the shapes more and more.  I added facial features such as nose, mouth and eye sockets to make it easier to sculpt these in with higher detail at a later state.

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Continuing to polish, it starts to look a bit more like a female shape. I make 2nd and 3rd passes to the facial features and for every pass it starts to look a bit better. When it comes to realistic faces every slight change makes it look more and more realistic. By step 7 the face looks very incorrect but after just a few slight changes and revamps it looks a ton better already by step 9.

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After a lot of polishing and adjusting I am quiet pleased with the result. You can definitely tell by the result how much I have learnt about anatomy in such a short amount of time and it was a very rewarding practice sculpt. I did learn a lot, especially about creating lips and noses. The hair I ended up not spending too much time on since the deadline of BA2 started to approach and I had to start on my final sculpt. Here is the final outcome.

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