Blog Four - Refining Models and Furthering Style Guides

This week was mostly a continuation of what I created last week, and going through a lot of critique cycles. Everyone in the group liked the base body model I made almost immediately, which felt really nice, but this sense of ease was definitely not the case with the process of modeling the face. 

First of all, hard sculpting a face is much, much harder than hard sculpting a body. Every vertex counts in making a smooth, easily rigged face with good edge flow and no triangles. Keeping edge loops is important, and so is balancing the necessary muscle structure of a face in a highly stylized environment. All of these factors led to a lot of hours being poured into this face, but even now, it feels like this face isn't completely satisfactory to the group. There are lots of opposing opinions on minor details in the face structure, which can get overwhelming, so I decided to take a step back from focusing on one of the girls' faces and put more energy into making changes to the base, to start visualizing the other girls. On top of this, I wanted to revisit and get a renewed sense of how we want to shade the girls, so I can better model their faces. 

Double-Checking Aesthetics 

To better inform the facial refinement process, I wanted to reconvene with my group to really understand how we wanted the girls to be rendered. I specifically wanted to know how detailed they wanted the shading to be, and how soft or cell-shaded we wanted the shadows to be in the final product. These things are really important when modeling in such a simple style relative to realism. These heads are very smooth, so depending on the shading style, the final, combined product can look a little uncanny.

With this in mind, I put together a bunch of references ranging from super stylized (level one) to painterly and semi-realistic (level four), and asked my group mates to tell me what they liked the best for shading. They landed somewhere between 2 and 3, which means strong, toon-shaded shadows mixed with smooth and shiny base tones.

Modeling Eyes and differentiating the gals 

With this renewed stylistic context in mind, I focused on developing some initial concepts for some 3D eyes for me to put into Substance Painter. These eyes were MUCH simpler to make than the faces, but got lots more compliments haha! Once I got my initial eye base done, I started to model some different eye shapes to start the differentiation between Jenny, Ashley, and Macy. Jenny has the sharpest eyes, Macy has the most downturned eyes, and Ashley has the most doe-eyed eyes. It's hard to toe the line between keeping these faces distinct and not stretching them to the point of uncanniness. 

Jenny

‍ ‍ Macy

Ashley

Overall, I really enjoy modeling faces and bodies, but it's also been taxing trying to perfect these bases because I know how important they are to the production. After texturing these eyes, I think Im gonna take a small break from people modeling and focus on assets.