Female Faces Part 2

So firstly I’ll throw down some sensational reference material while I remember to share it - I strongly suggest picking these books up and bookmarking these sites if you really want to get into studying hair and the female face, and how makeup is used to either enhance / change the planes of the face or even completely eliminate some features! Along with all kinds of interesting theories and of course a lot of full page face close-ups.

Face Forward - Kevyn Aucoin

Making Faces - Kevyn Aucoin

For Hairstyles I usually hit: here or here

Once you start really getting into all this, you start to get the sensation that all of these things more or less go together. Good makeup takes the natural features of the face and works with it, highlights the good parts and compensates for others. It works with the skin, eyebrows, eye color, the eye lashes, the shapes and contours of the nose, lips, brow, cheekbones etc etc and of course it’s all framed by a hairstyle.

So Hair....

Essentially a big part of the hairstyle choice has to do with the shape of the face, and the personality of the character. It’s a big silhouette impacter (I’m constantly making up words its epic), and can often be one of, if not the most standout and memorable feature of a female character.

So again go back into doing a craptonne of serious 'looking'
Grab a whole bunch of possible hairstyles you like, then take a front view of your model and dump it into PS and start drawing some rough shapes to match the ones you like, you’ll quickly see that some hairstyles or volumes just work better than others mainly due to the shape of the face you chose.

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Once you’ve got your hairstyle chosen out, what I do is build a few rough shells in Maya to basically give an overall volume at the back front and sides it’s pretty rough really - feels dirty to show… but hey!

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It really shouldn’t take long to build this stuff - just extrude edges like a maniac until you’ve got something you like - then throw it straight into zbrush and start smooshing those shells around to further shape it and move it into something more like you wanted. Once I get to that point with those basic shells, I move to the next level of detail and the front part of the face the fringe etc.

I basically make some smaller strands using the same edge extrude method - maybe 4 or 5 thinner wispier lengths and shapes to begin with and I throw those into zbrush and start duplicating and placing them around to build up more volume and shape - I prefer to do this in zbrush because is super easy to quickly shape all the strands by polygroup using the move tool.

While it looks like a huge jump from the last image to this one, it’s really not - it’s a simple process of taking a few more strands and duplicating, then moving them into place and smooshing them round - If you look closely you can see I’ve just duplicated the hell out of the same strands! The entire fringe is basically one strand, duplicated and moved, smooshed around, and same goes for almost all the rest of the hair volume.

http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/181/3/6/The_Twins_Project_WIP_3_by_HyperDivine.jpg

It probably shouldn’t take more than a couple hours to reach this point if you’re in the zone.

Important note: In my infinite wisdom I didn’t actually realize until fairly recently that it’s a good idea to unwrapped those strands straight before you send them to zbrush and start messing with them :P So make sure you do that if you plan to use this as your final hair shape.

I’m not going to go into how to texture hair, there’s good tutorials out there about that – hell here’s two:

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The other thing I’d like to hit in this part is the eyelashes because they are essentially the exact same approach, I make one eyelash and then duplicate that in zbrush and place them around the lids. I haven’t yet actually attempted to go full on cinematic style so ill generally use a much thicker lash at the base and far fewer strands - as readability is generally more important than accuracy for a game style character, even for a next gen hero unless you’re getting RIGHT up close to the eye. I will typically only do this for an approximation to help get a better feel for the whole face in zbrush though, I will generally paint some eyelashes on to an eyelash shaped single sided plane for the actual game model.

Zbrush
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Game
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Some important notes about this though, if you’re going to try go for all those strands in there, eyelashes always look more natural when they are kind of clumped together at the tips and maybe even like so:

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I personally think it looks fake / weird / strange when eyelashes are all the same length, same curve, spaced out the same etc etc:

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Lastly the eyebrows are also a key part of what goes into making an attractive eye area, they can throw the whole package out of whack so easily (as can most of the parts tbh) thicker eyebrows can give a youthful appearance while thinner brows can often make the face look more mature. Getting the arch correct is another key too.

Some good info here as well as the two books I mentioned at the start.

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Nice Eyebrow :)

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Lastly here is an awesome reference gallery for crazy eye makeup:

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I'll go into how I tackle my eye textures in the next part.....