The head of a character has always been something that I struggled with when it came to modeling… and also rigging, but I’ll discuss that later. The reason the face is so hard for me is the anatomy of it all. With the body,a lot of the anatomy can be thought of as bigger shapes, where the curves flow in and out in a certain way but over a bigger distance so it’s easier to control and if something is a little off, it’s not as easy to spot. With a head sculpt, it is the opposite. A small hiccup is very easy to spot and sometimes it takes reworking more than just the small area that isn’t working to get it to look right. Since I don’t have a strong background in art, I never really learned about anatomy either, so a lot of it, particularly at AnimSchool, was learning while I was working on it. However that isn’t terrible! I got to learn the concepts by applying them, which was really helpful!
The difficult thing about heads is the style of it. A more realistic head is a bit easier because you can pull from references online. There is so much reference and it should definitely be something that is referred back to when modeling anything. Reference is important! But there is something a bit harder with stylized heads, in the case of aqua, with the anime style. As a modeler, I have to find a way to make it feel like a head but also have that style in it, something that I’m still working on and will require a lot of practice. A particular thing with the anime style is the shape of the chin. I luck out a bit with Aqua because it’s a more gradual v-shape which is kind of how human faces are (depending on the face of course) but where I struggled with her was the proportions of her chin. In the original art, the distance from her lips to her chin is rather large, which doesn’t look natural when modeled in 3D, though it looks perfectly fine in 2D. So I started modeling her head by following the concept art exactly (far left head) and I started to move away from that shape because it didn’t look natural. After many iterations, I ended up at the head on the far left, which looks more like a human head but still stylized.
Now that I have a head where the proportions are to my liking, I want to play with it a bit. Can I get a chin shape that is similar to the concept art? My current head gives her a much softer and shorter chin. Can I get it closer to the art without her looking like an alien? This is something I’ll be thinking about as I move on.
