Looking for head reference images

[EvilTheCat]

I've looked a lot, and any of the good sites seem to go down fast, as it seems to be in the 3d world. fineart.sk, hippidrome.com, metagons.com All used to be excelent sites, then they disapeared for teh most part.

The best thing I've come across is searchnig for celebrity shots if i need a head template of soem kind. Searching www.altavista.com (http://www.altavista.com) or www.google.com (http://www.google.com) using their image search can lead to quite a few results. Alta vista can even sort out by size. Another one I use quite a bit is www.coribs.com (http://www.coribs.com) They're a comercial site, but the prviews are usualy big enough for a template. Also, if you ca find the right news groups, you can find plublicity photos in super high rez. The kinda stuff they grab for news paper articles, or to stick in a book or something like that. Those are great for textures.

Then there's always the obvious friends and cameras. If you want to be specific, take you'r own pictures. If you don't ahve a scanner or digital camera, most places that will develope can make you digital copies of your pictures. There's even disposible cameras out there now specificaly ment for digital prints. This can make your job easier sometimes because you can pick your own lighting, angles, backgrounds, body types, etc.

If you want to do cartoon characters, if you pick a specific show sometimes you can acutaly dig up character turn arounds. Searchig for phrases like Turn-around, model sheet, character sheet, character line up, etc. These are harder to find, and tend to not be orthographic anyway. You'll probably only get one shot at most that's anything worth rotoscoping, and most of the time, 2d artist cheet anatomy, so body parts don't line up from front to side views.

If you can, learn to not rely so much on othographic templates. I used to a lot, and I'd always end up in this situation. If i have to model anybody specific i try to find the best front and side view I can, mostly to get the volume right. Then I find as many pictures of the subject as posible, and just use them as reference photos, but I never actualy rotoscope most of them. I've started to get better results doing this than I ever did relying on only two planes of information. The front and side shots I get are never perfect or symetrical, but like I said are mostly there for the volume of the shapes. Its more like traditional sculpting in this sence. it's hard at first, but I assure you, if you stick with it, you'll get better at modeling in general, and spend a whole lot less time working on templates in the end. Drawing the subject before modeling can often help me understand the shapes I'm about to create also, and is generaly just a good exercise for my brain before modeling.

Here's a link from work. It might have something for you to use. I forgot to mention Comics and art books are another great resource. http://www.jmaccoy.com/teaching/webpages/Individual_lesson_pages/Character_turn_around/character_turn_around.htm

[Martinos]

Thanks a lot, thats great advice.
I'm currently modeling one of the drawings in the link you gave.

:)

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.