[WIP]New head in blender

[Alecu]

It has always been my greatest wish to make a new female head for oblivion using blender mostly due to the fact that I like it a lot. Since this contains a lot of facts related to blender and maybe some future questions,I will post it here.

The current stage is quite advanced but there where a lot of troubles and issues along the way and there are still many left. I never really hoped that I will get anywhere with this.

 

Anyway,after reading several tutorials on the internet about faces,it didn't seem all that complicated so I decided to start making it. And I was way too wrong.Here's the first atempt:

 

link

 

link2

 

 

As you can see,it turned out really horrible.I modeled it the way I model armor which was a bad thing and I didn't fully understand the proportions of the human head. After a bit more research I discovered that there were many ways to model faces and concluded that I failed because it wasn't suited to me. I tried to model the face from a simple box while other people started by making loops from edges around the face and then filling them with faces. And that's what I just did.

So I imported the default oblivion head and started to make loops around the head which included the mouth,area around the mouth,the eyes,area along the eyes,nose and so on.

 

Blender has a nice camera and view when modeling so it helped me a lot. I didn't split the view plane, I just followed the loops around the face with the one view in a natural way as possible.

 

link

 

link

 

It's not done yet in these screenshots.To make those loops I extruded one vertice along the face.It wasn't perfect but I adjusted them in the next stage.

 

And here's the final result:

 

result

 

It looks quite ugly and I made a mistake with the eyes,but that became obvious later,when I started filling the faces. And the nose loop isn't that good but I improved it when I filled them with faces. Also I only focused on the face part.

 

Then I started to fill those loops with faces:

 

faces

 

Sometimes I needed to rearrange the vertices around the loops because some had more vetices than others so I couldn't fill the area between them with loops.And you have to bear in mind not just he front view,but also the side view and to rearrange them to look proper from side view too.

 

Another two:

 

another

 

selection with the edges that will become part of a new face between the loops

 

By this time,it became clear that the mouth wasn't quite right.But it really started looking like a human face.Also I didn't know how to make the nose loops and sometimes I really had a hard time adjusting the loops so that the space between them was completely filled.

I think I also added some new ones when filling the faces.

 

Here's one more with the loops almost filled:

 

almost filled

 

I added a subsurf modifier to the mesh in the meantime.When filling the loops,additional curves and lines appeared and you also had to pay attention with them.Another hard thing to do was to get all the curves from the mouth to the end of the face.

 

And here's the final one when I filled all the loops:

 

filled loops

 

Now there were several problems with that.The nose didn't have any nostrils lol and the edge flow wasn't quite right(it's very important for a face to have good edge flow because it will be easier to animate with expressions and they will seem much more natural if the edge flow is done properly,at least that's what the tutorials say).Another small problem was with the eyes loops,should have made the a bit bigger but after looking at other faces, I left them like that.

 

I still don't know if the vertice indexes aren't screwed for a face but this should affect me.

 

Here's where the edge flow didn't appear quite right but after some study I left it like that:

 

mistake

 

And another thing,the lips aren't done yet because I can't enclose them with a loop for the simple reason that they have to open when smiling lol.

 

Now I had to make the lips and after some careful thinking I decided to select half of the moth loops and extrude it for the lower and upper lips. This way,a gap will be left that will allow the mouth to open.

 

Here's the selection that I made:

 

selection

 

And now extrusion:

 

extrusion

 

Three or four extrusions where enough. After each one I had to rearrange each individual vertex to make them more and more in a straight line as the mouth closed.A thing that I had to remember:the lips also have a certain shape.

 

Lips done but they still look bad and I haven't done anything about the eyes either:

 

lips done

 

It can be clearly seen that the face resembles a mask and I think it should be like that(I know,there are a LOT of things wrong with this face,later I realized all of them and corrected as many as I could).

Before I moved on with finish the other parts of the head, I smoothed out the face by dragging the vertices to "flow" or just by randomly moving them till the area looked smooth lol.Subsurf actually helped smoothing the face because you can easily spot the areas where the subsurfed part intersects the original one.

 

I added nostrils to the nose by rearranging some vertices and adding more and then moving the area upwards. No big deal here:

 

nostrils

 

After smoothing and adding more rings to the eyes to leave room to model the eye socket:

 

smoothing

 

The loop of the eyes had to be extruded inwards because all the other heads that I studied had that and it was for a very simple reason: to perfectly enclose the eye balls,without that you may see gaps when looking at the eyes from different angles. And you wouldn't want that.

 

Here's what I am talking about:

 

no name

 

All that was left was to enclose the face in a head. This was done by various ways,including extrusion or adding more loops.

 

almost finished the rest of the head

 

End of part one.

[Alecu]

Part two

 

I eventually finished modeling the head for the most part.

Here it is:

 

finished most of the modeling part

 

And it looked horrible lol. I only noticed that later after I asked my mother to take a look at the head. Also,there were a lot of things wrong with it,the most obvious one are the eyes,way too big and the area around the eyes.

A very important detail regarding the mouth was left out by me because I didn't know about it and the neck needed some serious remodeling to fit with the rest of the body. But I had a head so I was really happy and it kinda looked female so I wasn't that discouraged.

 

Even the loops and edges kinda looked female:

 

female like loops and edges

 

Here you can see some areas where I don't like how the loops or curves are closing:

 

more mistakes

 

But they are hardly noticeable so I will leave them like that.I noticed that triangles are a delicate matter and sometimes they result in small bumps and other imperfections in the mesh.

 

After smoothing and adjusting the face even more,I started remodeling the neck because it was to thin and that as it was it would have left a massive gap with the upper body part when I got the face in-game. I should always had a upper body in the view when modeling the head.

 

In the meantime I finished the important detail about the mouth which I still don't know what it exactly means but it probably has something to do with concealing the mouth area when the mouth is open:

 

detail

 

The mouth actually has an area normally invisible inside the head.

 

One more thing I forgot to mention. I didn't like the fact that with all the head that I say the mouth didn't have enough definition so I added some extra loops around the mouth for that:

 

extra loops

 

This is about all for today. The modeling part of the head is mostly done,even got it in-game and texture it,made some new ears for it,though it doesn't blink yet.But before that there is still a lot more left to say.

 

race menu.

 

That's the bare face. I didn't change any sliders in the menu. The only thing I did change was the the age,the age maps are wrong but the head doesn't work without them. Still some issues with the texture.

[Ghogiel]

these 2 links are a great resource for face modelling research.

http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/showthread.php?t=907

http://www.phungdinhdung.org/Studies_paper/Realistic_face_modeling.shtm

[throttlekitty]

Nice progress there! My only crit on your topology is that the nostrils are missing an important loop for definition there. Ghogiels first link talks about that one in particular in a few places in the thread. In the future, you'll want to do a more complete blockout to get your proportions down first, it's easy to go too far working with too many loops at such an early stage. The chin looks a bit small to me.

 

It shouldn't matter much up there, but if the triangle terminations from the extra loops is causing problems with your smoothness, here's a clean way to do them:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/0903/throttlekitty/Paintovers/Alecu_paintover1.jpg

 

 

Oh, and that inner portion of the mouth? Get rid of that thing! I wrestled with it way too much when I did my head cleaning up the morphs; and it doesn't really need to be there. The mouth piece comes up nicely with the teeth and head, it's never seen.

[Alecu]

these 2 links are a great resource for face modelling research.

http://www.subdivisionmodeling.com/forums/showthread.php?t=907

http://www.phungdinhdung.org/Studies_paper/Realistic_face_modeling.shtm

 

Extremely useful and quite interesting,especially the last link. It seems I would need to make some changes to the face,in the nose area and mouth and maybe forehead,though I haven't seen that move and bend on the other heads. But I can't go into every detail with the face because they won't show in-game and they will add a lot of polygons.

But it could have been worse,this is the second time I am doing this. I intentionally added full loops around the eyes to make room for some precise makeup.

 

 

Nice progress there! My only crit on your topology is that the nostrils are missing an important loop for definition there. Ghogiels first link talks about that one in particular in a few places in the thread. In the future, you'll want to do a more complete blockout to get your proportions down first, it's easy to go too far working with too many loops at such an early stage. The chin looks a bit small to me.

 

It shouldn't matter much up there, but if the triangle terminations from the extra loops is causing problems with your smoothness, here's a clean way to do them:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/0903/throttlekitty/Paintovers/Alecu_paintover1.jpg

 

 

Oh, and that inner portion of the mouth? Get rid of that thing! I wrestled with it way too much when I did my head cleaning up the morphs; and it doesn't really need to be there. The mouth piece comes up nicely with the teeth and head, it's never seen.

 

Didn't notice the missing nose loop even after reading the links and it was very important.

 

Thank you very much for your replies. Exactly what I needed.

 

There are still a lot of issues left. I was planning to weight paint the upper and lower lips with separate vertex groups,and then apply a lattice to each of the vertex groups. This way I would be able to open the lips without dirtying my hands manually adjusting the lips. And I will be able to reuse the weight paint for most of the mouth expressions. I noticed that I can easily reshape the head with lattices while preserving the edge flow quite well.

 

But the biggest problem will be the eye lids. Even if I manage to add the eye morphs,I'm sure I will be stuck with notorious eye lids bug,when the eye lids go all the way down to the feet when the eye close. Despite the fact that the head appears normal in-game,in the construction set it appears at shoulder level at not in the center with the eyes,hair and others. This probably hints to the bug.I have some solutions to this,but before that there are still other issues to be solved.

 

I'm actually a bit reserved regarding the entire head,if I will be able to get it all right and finish this properly, but there are solutions to every problem still left.

[throttlekitty]

Anything goes when it comes to animating :D

With the eyelids, "the droop" isn't a bug; just an improperly handled head. I'll try and find the link, but there's a blender tutorial for how to properly handle positioning for facegen and skinnng. (now i need to remember where i found that one...)

[Alecu]

More stuff.

 

I actually managed to get the head in-game a long time ago. And make a uv layout for it. There are quite a lot of things to mention.

 

I really like the profile:

 

beautiful profle

 

I made the face a bit fat because I wanted the face to be different, this is intended as an alternative, I wanted to make something new and fresh. So far it looks quite natural in-game and quite different from what I have seen so far.

 

I mainly modeled this head with these things in my mind:

-young looks and a bit cute even if it meant it wouldn't be a models head

 

-consistent face, I didn't like the huge negative impact that light can have on a face. Sometimes you couldn't even recognize your face because of poor light or it looked really different. I had to sacrifice some of the beauty that you can get in perfect lightning conditions to achieve this.

 

-better angles, I tried to make this head look female and nice from as many angles as I could trying to achieve a more uniform look

 

-reduce ripples and smoother looks. In some conditions the shadows appear distorted and even hard lines appear on the standard oblivion faces. I tried to reduce them as much a possible and give the face a smoother look

 

-delicate and beautiful shapes. This is something to be expected since this is a female and I tried to make the face appear beautiful by it's shape also and not just texture

 

-precise uv map. I had to reduce the amount of details on the lips and nose to achieve this,but now you have more space on the cheeks to add tattoos and better makeup around the eyes. But you won't be getting those amazing lips and extreme close-ups probably won't look that good but I'm not going to sacrifice everything I've made so far just to allow one or two types of screenshots.This is intended as an alternative

 

-by making the precise uv layout I guess you can sculpt this face quite easily into a lot of shapes and the texture won't look that deformed

 

-it is somehow quite restrictive but I can't do anything about that, especially with the lips

 

All in all, I wanted something new,different and fresh.I probably made a lot of mistakes but so far everything seems ok.

 

More in-game screenshots:

 

shadows

 

shadows2

 

at night

 

outside

 

angle

 

This is the best one so far:

 

best so far

 

Now with the uv layout. Since blender heavily distorted the face when unwrapping I had to unwrap the face by projecting the face from a suitable angle and pin the major shapes in the uv window so they wouldn't break when unwrapping the face the final time.In the end I had to pin and move nearly all the vertices to get it the way I wanted. There where almost 1000 of them :laugh: . Took me a couple of hours.I accidently discovered that the uv testing squares would appear very straight and uniform if I did it like this so I was very happy :) . But some areas are very stretched but they will be concealed by the hair.

 

Here's the default oblivion head with the uv layout and the new head:

 

uv test texture

 

back

 

side

 

uv layout on the right

 

Also,the last screenshots with the head in blender weren't up to date. I made a lot of changes in the meantime to make it possible to get the head in-game. And I added more loops,at the nose and the corners of the mouth:

 

front

 

angle

 

angle2

 

I didn't like the default oblivion ears so I made new ones,4k polygons :laugh: .

 

ears

 

And while reading the tutorials about eye morphs I realized that blender had no way of showing the vertex index so I had to learn some python and make a small script to write the selected vertices indexes in a text file. This makes things a lot more easier. I can customize that script even more but I still have limited knowledge of python.

 

This is the script

 

#!BPY

"""
Name: 'Export Selected Vertices'
Blender: 249
Group: 'Export'
Tooltip: 'Selected Vertices Exporter'
"""
import Blender
import bpy

def exportVertices(filename):
       out = file(filename, "w")
       sce = bpy.data.scenes.active
       for ob in sce.objects:
               try:
                       mesh = ob.getData(mesh=1)
                       out.write(ob.name + "\n")
                       for vert in mesh.verts:
                               if vert.sel == 1:
                                       out.write( ' v %s \n' % (vert.index) )
               except:
                       print( "Object %s probably doesn't have any vertices" % ( ob.name ))
       out.close()

Blender.Window.FileSelector(exportVertices,"export")

 

But now I have university on my head,last year and the hardest one, so I will have a lot more trouble from now on and the progress will be slowed down.

 

Either way,even if it's not done, I will release this head as a curiosity in it's current state :happy: .

[LHammonds]

Thanks for sharing your learning process.

 

Here is another link that you might find useful. The Humanoid Mesh, this team is working on making a single humanoid mesh that can morph into a male, female, small child, super-muscular or obese man. This particular page shows some of the evolution of their model into its current state.

[Alecu]

Thanks for sharing your learning process.

 

Here is another link that you might find useful. The Humanoid Mesh, this team is working on making a single humanoid mesh that can morph into a male, female, small child, super-muscular or obese man. This particular page shows some of the evolution of their model into its current state.

 

That's quite some advanced stuff there. It even involves serious biology.I'm still new to these things,around 4 or 5 months.

 

I can't make too many changes to the face in it's current stage. I still need to move on to the next stage,it already has 7k polygons which is more than enough. Adding any more details would greatly increase the polygon count,several times, and they won't show in-game probably.I will see what can I do about this.

[Ghogiel]

tbh, I would have made the ears part of the head mesh itself. saves painting across extra maps, and less nifs to faff with in the end, hmm, would that make the morphs larger?

 

4k tris on the ears is getting over the top there, that would make a pair of ears more poly heavy than your face!

 

the f3 ears are like 20-30tris, it's all normal mapped.

 

saying that it looks good.