I
knew that I would never get accurate representations of either
Timothy Spall or Natalie Portman, but I still needed to get
characters who looked good. Being the first time that I tried to make
realistic-ish human figures, I didn't get the best looking characters
at first attempt. (In fact, I did try to create a realistic
self-portrait that was used for Homeless Guy; it ended up looking
like a bad PlayStation1 video game character; this time I was going
for better.)
But
then I learned an important step that every artist knows: the first
pass is never the best, and it must always be improved. Perhaps the
first drafts of these particular characters were a lot rougher than
professionals start with, but I was proud of having at least this
much to work from. From their initial faces, I had a lot of tweaking
to still do, just moving one vertex at a time, or moving faces back
and forth to see what looks best.
At
this stage, I knew that I wanted both characters to be a bit more
stylized rather than photorealistic. For the student, I remembered a
rule for anime characters: big eyes, small mouth. Along with trying to
make her jaw a bit more feminine, I kept tweaking until I got
something I liked. And then asked other people how I could make their
faces better still.
One
thing that I knew I couldn't get away without making is the
nasolabial fold. That is the line that goes down from the top of the
nostrils to frame the mouth. I knew that I wanted this more
pronounced in Zann's face, but even thought the student would be
younger, her underlying physiology would still have such muscles
under the face. I had to use different modeling tools to draw this
line in, and even had to make a more three-vertices faces than I feel
comfortable with.
The
other thing that I needed to remember is to make the geometry as
simple as possible. That's because it is a lot easier altering
low-resolution geometry than altering high-resolution geometry.
Pseudo-smoothing tools really helped in this regard, which kept the
poly-count low, but smoothed them as though these were
high-resolution models.
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