Been working a lot on my Sam model for Tinselfly lately. I think it’s starting to look pretty nice.

 

Here are some disconnected thoughts about the whole thing:

• If you told me a few months ago that that best way to do this would be to manually create and move every single point on the model (instead of using higher level tools of some sort) I totally wouldn’t have believed you. But that’s exactly what I’m doing here.
• Right now, I’m just concentrating on making something that looks like a human — not this human. Sam will be dark-skinned, with a wider, flatter nose than this and fuller lips.
• Sam is probably dark-skinned because I have pretty in his character description. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I just think of dark skin when I think ‘pretty’. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about me.
• I added some tear ducts. It may seem like a stupidly tiny detail, given that this character will be like two inches tall on screen, but that really helped me understand the shape of the eyes.
• I am not using any specific reference. I am not tracing a photographed model or a hand-drawn character design. That would probably make things easier, but I am finding that using references of all ages, races and genders is helping me better understand facial structure in general.
• I’m not sure what’s up with the shading on the chin, lower lip, and above the ear. As far as I can tell, everything’s pretty smooth there. Gotta look into that.
• It’s nearly impossible to work on the ears without frequent renderings with shadows turned on.
  Without shadows, the ear is just a strange blob; so much of what we think of when we think of ears isn’t shape, but color.
• My model (including the body) has something like 15,000 triangles right now. I don’t know if that’s acceptable or not.
• I can’t wait to move on to Sam’s costume. 😛