Anatomy Thread of Joel Mongeon - 2D/3D

#1

Hi everyone, I am really impressed by all the work in the sketchbook and anatomy threads. I’ve finally got some free time and thought I’d start doing some daily 3d anatomy studies. I will be focusing on facial features for the first set of studies.
The first feature I will work on is the nose. I will (hopefully) sculpt a nose using zbrush every day and post my progress here. I will try to limit each study to 30-60 minutes each.

I decided to do this after posting my “study of Anne” here and on other forums, it was a real inspiration getting so much feedback. It also made realise I still have a lot to learn, especially with the features of the face. http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=132&t=464230&highlight=study+anne

Day 1 and I already broke the rules and went over the one hour mark on this sculpt, oh well… tomorrow I’ll do better :wink:
Sculpted from a plane in zbrush and rendered in 3ds max. Crits and comments always welcome.

#2

Welcome aboard, Joel, this should be a really good thread to follow. :slight_smile: Definitely check out the threads of anandpg, Intervain, Thomasphoenix, claybub, oDdity, Zapan, Gunilla, Womball etc., as these are some of 3D people who post regularly here…some very inspiring stuff around. :slight_smile:

Not much to crit for this one atm, but I look forward to seeing more of your pieces.

Cheers, :slight_smile:

-Rebeccak

#3

hey joel!

-your “study of anne” was very good. your sketch plan sounds very good and i’m really looking forward to see what you come up with.
haven’t got anything to crit on this one.

-r

#4

Day 2
Time wise I was a bit better today, just over an hour… I feel I was close with this one, but still missing some nice planes especially around the nostril. By the way, my first set of nose studies are being done from plaster casts I purchased from Philippe Faraut a while ago. (http://philippefaraut.com/supplies.html) When I’ve sculpted all my casts at least once, maybe twice, I plan on using photos gathered from 3d.sk for variation. Comments welcome.

Rebeccak: Thanks for the welcome! I’ve been wanting to participate on forums more often but work seems to always get in the way there. I hope I can add something useful to these forums in the future. I haven’t seen all of those 3d threads, I’ll definetly check them out!

Abyss103: Thanks, glad you liked Anne. Hopefully I’ll learn quite a bit about the features of the human face from these sketches, and speed up my sculpting. In a couple of days I may decide to model a basemesh to speed up the sculpting.

Anyway, hope you enjoy day 2’s model.

#5

Hi there! I saw your thread zbrushcentral about Anne. The nose looks really nice on the first day. Your losing the form on the second day, I think it should be rotated down more.

#6

Nice renders and modeling!
So, are you sculpting these from a plane… and export the highres to Max or do you use a displacement map?
Looks real good, I’m looking forward to follow this.

#7

Great stuff here, i especially like the first one. Some bad advice maybe (just my personal opinion): maybe you should not confine yourself to the 1 hour limit - ake the first peice and devellop it furtehr. Add some more detail in modelling, material and lighting. It would look really great. Anyway, keep going!

#8

I like how today’s nose turned out, however I still would have liked to keep some of the planes around the Alar cartilage. I’m getting faster with the sculpting from a plane, hit the one hour mark with this one.

Womball: Can you elaborate on how you think I can bring the form back into the second nose? As for rotating it down, each day I am sculpting a new nose. The second nose was somewhat upturned. Here is a picture of the cast I am working from.

Day 1 was the top left nose, Day 2 was the top right nose. Today’s is the bottom right. This is a great cast to use as it has many different sizes and shapes of noses.

Gunilla: Thanks, I’m glad you like my studies. I am sculpting from a plane inside of zbrush with only a few subdivisions at first. I paint on some rough measurements and just sculpt away from there… Here is a breakdown of day 2’s nose.

batte812: Thanks, glad you like the sketches. The reason I am doing these studies are for speed and building a repetoire of noses, next will propably be the mouth and then the eyes. Most of the time I personally stick with one type of nose on my models and I don’t want to get into a rut where all of my work looks the same. Once I have progressed enough I may go back and work on shaders and texturing my studies. I think it would be better to do surface studies all at once, don’t you?

Stay tuned for more updates. Crits always welcome!

#9

You may not need to rotate it since I have seen the front view now. I do think the tip of the nose could be even more bulbous. You may want to study the nose without skin. It may help with creating some noses since some people you can see the clefts in their nose.

#10

Hi, nice 3d sculpts! That’s a good idea…doing a lot of studies on just one body part like the nose. Maybe in the end you can put them all side by side to compare, like in that image you posted that had 4 different noses, that looks neat :slight_smile:
Very nice renders too, they all look clean and crisp.

#11

Alright, day 4! Finished the last of noses on the plaster cast. Turned out alright, I am not happy where the lateral and Alar cartilage meet. I sketched this nose from 2 views before starting, I think it did help discover some of the planes of this particular nose before I began my sculpt. Again, modelled in zbrush from a 7X7 plane.

Looks like my plan for sculpting a nose a day will have it’s first hurdle this weekend as I am visiting familly and won’t have my computer… maybe I’ll bring some anatomy books and a sketchbook and do as Womball suggested.

Roja: shhh! Don’t ruin the surprise! :wink:

Womball: Yeah I think you’re right, more bulbous… next time… gotta keep going forward. I think next week I’ll resculpt these noses again before going onto photo ref noses, just to see how much better/worse the second round goes. This weekend I think I’ll try and find time to do some 2d studies of the nose from anatomy books.

Anyway, comments and crits welcome as always.

#12

Today was kind of a breakthrough day for me. The past few days I’ve found it hard to get the planes of the nose in and with 20 minutes left in todays study I remembered a modelling Vid by Voodoomonkey over at Zbrushcentral on using masks. Lo and behold by using masks I was able to quickly paint and refine some planes. It might not look like much but next week when I am back I’ll be seeing how much earlier in my sculpting process I can start to mask out areas and create nice planes. Anyway, here is today’s nose, from another plaster cast from Philippe Faraut. I rendered 2 views since the one I’ve been using doesn’t really show where I made progress on nose modelling :wink:

Comments and crits welcome, see you all next week after my long drive to cold Ottawa.

View 1:

View 2:

#13

started working from photo ref today instead of plaster casts, this one felt more loose and fun while doing it.

#14

Really liking this one in particular - looks like your exercises are paying off, are you thinking of doing these for other features of the face as well? :slight_smile:

#15

Quoted for agreement

v. inspiring stuff, keep it up, on all parts on the body :thumbsup:…

#16

Here is today’s nose. A few areas I would liked to have smoothed out but ran out of time, otherwise I’m happy with today’s model.

I also rerendered yesterdays nose as I found the view I’ve been using from the start is not always the best for the model.

Rebeccak: Thanks, yeah that nose turned out quite well. I think it also had to do with rendering and lighting that second shot based on what looks good for the nose and not keeping a standard camera and lighting rig for each model. I do want to get useful crits on these models and not try to hide any mistakes since that’s how we all learn, but rendering a view that shows off a model better is probably the best way to go.
My plan is to next do studies of the mouth for a month, I did get casts of mouths, eyes and ears as well so I’ve got a lot to work with. :slight_smile:

Synkipate: Thanks, I’m glad it is inspiring, I’m finding it is a great way to keep in (3d) shape while I’m on vacation. We’ll see about ALL the body parts. I did do quite a few arm skeleton studies 2 years ago, clay and 3d… maybe I should dig these up and post them here? I don’t think I ever did post them.

Comments, crits always welcome.

#17

hey plunq! Really interesting studies you’ve got here! I like the sculptural approach :slight_smile: will be keeping an eye on your thread for sure :slight_smile:

#18

I love these “facial fragments” (reminds me of Jasper Johns)

Great modelling :thumbsup:

Gord

#19

I like the last nose a lot. How many will you be doing? I find actually the lips to be much hard er to model. Their shape is very tricky to get right especially at the corners of the lip.

How did you texture that one creatures lips from your portfolio? I’m trying to do something similar for an animated character. I assume its with zbrush.

#20

Here is today’s nose, overall it felt a lot easier doing today’s nose, I even got it done with 10 minutes to spare.

Intervain: Thanks, glad you like the sculpts. I was sculpting in clay for quite a few years but never got around to doing feature studies in clay, so this is my way of doing it but digitally :slight_smile:

Gord: Thanks, glad you like it!

Womball: I had a lot of fun doing yesterdays nose, a lot more loose and expressive I think. (Well, as loose and expressive as anatomy studies can get I guess).
As for lips, your best bet is to pick up some anatomy books on the face. The corner of the lips do turn in at the corners when the mouth is closed. This is extremely important to nail down so that your lips look natural. I’d also suggest some sculpting books. I’ve always got “Modelling and Sculpting the Human Figure” by Edouard Lanteri and “Modelling the Head in Clay” by Bruno Lucchesi on my desk at all times. They should be easy to find of amazon.

As for texturing… do you mean Charlie on my portfolio? If so, I painted the bump map using alpha stamping with projection master in zbrush using a map that looked close to lips. It was pretty easy. The diffuse map was created by Richard Rosenman. I think Richard used some standard brushes in projection master. Hope that answers your question, if not, please ask :slight_smile:

Synkipate: I found this picture of on of my clay studies and thought I’d post it here as well just to break things up a bit. Done over several weeks at the Toronto School of Art life sculpting class a few years ago. It was a fun excercise creating the bones of the lower arm and hands with clay… very fragile. Once this was done I did another arm skeleton study in maya that I rigged so that I could better understand how the bones of the arm worked. I’ll try and find that stuff later.