 Yeah, thanks for coming to my live sculpting demo. My name is Damien. I've been a character artist for the past six years full-time. I currently work as lead character artist for Ecosoft, which are a medium, small game developer based in Germany, most known for a game series called the X Games. Today I'm going to be showing you how to sculpt the human head. We are going to do a Caucasian male and the focus is going to be on how to create attractive features on your characters and how to avoid some common mistakes that especially beginners tend to make when they sculpt faces. So we don't have a lot of time for a full face. So let's just jump into it right away. When I sculpt, can you still hear me? Okay. So we start with a sphere and I just use the grab brush to quickly establish my overall proportions. The head is around 1.5 times as tall as it is wide and I just create something that looks a bit similar to a motorcycle helmet to capture the overall form and silhouette of the head. One thing that especially people who are very new often forget is that when you look at the head from below, from above, you've got this taper towards the front, so it's widest right behind the ear. And it's important to always look at your sculpt from different angles and make sure that it works from everywhere because of course this is 3D and we can't just fake perspectives. So we've got something that loosely resembles the overall shape of the head. I'm careful, like overall I'm not caring too much at what this looks like but I'm already being pretty careful with my jawline. And then we can add a cylinder which we then scale up to make it a little bit taller on the Z axis and then scale it down to the proportions we're working with here. And then I'm going to rotate that about 15 degrees on the Y axis and move it down a little bit. So that's going to be our neck. I add a loop cut that I then rotate. That's important because I'm going to extrude the shoulders now. And the neck doesn't sit on the shoulders like horizontally. It comes out of the shoulders at an angle. So it's important to have that here immediately when we start. Keeper layout is different to what I'm used to so bear with me for a little bit. And then I just add another loop cut here that I move forward a little bit to capture that curvature of the neck a little bit. And then we go in, we add an other cylinder and this one is going to be our ear. We just squish that. There are other ways of doing that. You could just mask out the side of the head and then at the ear that way by just pulling it out, for example. I just like working with these primitives in the early stages and that way I can establish the overall volumes that I need. For example, with this ear I don't care too much again what it looks like. But just having it in place helps me already contextualize the shape of the skull a little bit better. So right now when I try to put it in place I realize that the jawline was still a little bit off so I can just go into the skull and just adjust that a little bit. And the ear attaches approximately the lower part it attaches where the base of the nose sits and the upper part is on the eye line so right now it's probably a little bit high. And then I just add a mirror modifier to that and apply that and then I can merge all these objects together. And then I can go into sculpt mode and then if I remesh I can weld them all into one solid geometry. And then I'm going to start sculpting. I always start with the neck for two reasons. First of all, once again it helps me contextualize what's going on with the jaw, with the head in general, but especially with the jawline. And also if I don't do it directly I tend to forget about it later on. So the main forms that make up the shape for the neck are the trapezius muscle here in the back, runs down up the back of the neck and here down the shoulders and also on the back down between the shoulder blades. I'm using a planes approach so I basically just sketch in planes with my draw sharp brush and then I use a bunch of other brushes to refine what I did there. For example, a polish to maybe flatten out things a little bit, get rid of some volume or the clay brush a lot. And here this muscle is called the sternocleidomastoid. It comes very visible when you turn your head. Just adjusting the overall proportions a bit now and then I'm going to use the clay brush to just refine these forms a little bit at some mass here below the jaw. Some mass for the Adam's apple and then just refining that insertion a little bit. I don't need the neck to be super detailed. I just want to have it blocked and as I said to contextualize things for myself and so the end result looks a bit more finished. But in general, since we only have 50 minutes for the sculpt, I tend to leave the neck at a very rough block out stage and this is pretty much already good enough. I like four male characters to make the head almost as wide as the jaw because that tends to create a little bit more of an athletic look which overall I think I'm going for with this character but I'm going to explain more about that later. And now that we've got the neck established, we can finally really start sculpting the face. I start with establishing the eye line with my draw sharp brush. Just so sits vertically speaking in the center of the face and then I just add the brow line also with the draw sharp just in alternate mode. Then I can start establishing the frontal plane of my face. I already put the chin in there a little bit and then move things around a little bit on the y-axis because this is still missing some of the complexity right now. Then I go in with the polish brush and just flatten things out. This is a similar approach to something like the Asaro hat or what you would find in anatomy books like Anatomy for Sculptors and this approach for me personally helps a lot because it visualizes things very well and it helps my eyes read what's going on a little bit. So I start out with very simplified sharp forms and then slowly I just make them more complex as the sculpt develops. Later when I decrease the voxel density and we have some more topology, I can then go in and create more of the secondary forms. Right now I need to adjust the proportions a bit because my face is way too wide especially the jaw. But as I said, faces are always seen in context so you don't see single facial features. You see them in context with each other which is why once we add more of these planes here and establish more of the facial features, we can understand the proportions and everything a little bit better and we see early mistakes maybe while I was moving around the clay a little bit. We can see those a little bit better. Right now I'm just establishing the cheek area a little bit as well as defining the front plane a little bit. Looking at it from different angles again like for example right here I'm interested in what my silhouette looks like. This is still a little difficult because I'm missing the mask for the mouth basically. And then I just go in here with my clay brush just add a bunch of like a clay strip and then I can use my grab brush to adjust the shape of that nose that we just blocked in and then I'll look at it from below. As I said always look at your sculpts from different angles and I can widen the base of the nose and when you look at the nose from below it kind of looks like this triangle with one side cut off. And what's important is that the base of the nose isn't like completely straight like this. It comes out of the face. I like this curvature with the filter sitting right below that. Then I go in with a polish brush and I can just polish away some of the mass here and bring out a bit of the rest and that way I can quickly create like a loose obelisk shape that is going to be the main mass for my nose which I can later carve out more of the secondary features from and then I just establish the transition of the nose and the brow line a little bit more. And now that I've got the nose I'm going to put in the mouth mound which is basically just all this tissue being being stretched over the teeth and I also look at that from below because I need to be able to see what's happening with that curvature and that way helps me establish like a proper layering of tissue because we want to we want to create the illusion when we sculpt that there is something going on underneath the skin. So it's important to respect volumes like that are created like for example by the teeth in this case and at this stage I like to just very roughly already block in the lips because it just helps me read that curvature. Once again facial features contextualizing each other and I don't have the resolution yet to properly draw in the lips but just doing this is already helpful for me to see the shape of that arc and if it's coming out right and then I can just pull the base of the of the nose out a little bit more to get a more natural shape in my upper lip when looking at it from from the side and right now my face is kind of tilted upwards so I'll just pull this down and back a little bit and it's important to me to establish my proportions early on you can always tweak them later but since yeah we only have 50 minutes as mentioned multiple times already I need things to to go fast I need everything to basically look right as quickly as possible before I move on because later on when I have more topology here every every adjustment is going to be a little more tedious a little more difficult because I've got more polygons to manipulate to to get the desired result so yeah I really try to get everything right here while still in this in this blocking stage and yeah as I said I mostly use the the draw sharp to just draw in these these lines and create my features and define these plane changes and later as the the scope progresses I'm going to get more and more into more realistic forms that are a little bit softer because right now when you've got the planes like this things tend to look very stylized so I'm looking at this right now from a three-quarter view and I'm not really happy with with how the cheek is looking in the silhouette and there's something I do a lot I sculpt on this side up in the face but I'm actually looking here seeing seeing what's happening on that side because I need need to adjust my silhouette but of course I can't sculpt very well here and yeah just need to add a bit more mass down here bring in my primary planes a little bit again with the draw sharp and this something I do throughout the sculpt whenever I lose them a little bit I just bring them back quite heavily and then I can just smooth things out whenever I need to when whenever things get too planer I'm going to add some volume now for the eyes so we have less of a skull look going on here so I just add a UV sphere which I add some rings to or rather increase the number of rings um just so I have a little more topology here to draw out the the cornea that which is the the lens that sits on top of the eye rotate this so the topology helps me more with that and then I can just grab this ring here move the cursor to it and maybe one further out uh move the cursor to it hide it select this island unhide and then I can move this on the y-axis of course I need to use the cursor actually otherwise snapping it there didn't do much and then we can scale this down to the size of our eye I just realized that I this is not going to be the eye itself it's just going to be the the main mass that sits over the over the eye so I didn't really need to add that cornea yet but I'm gonna end up just copying this so I can use it for the actual eyeball later so this is going to be merged into into the face and I had a mirror modifier so I can visualize things a little bit better move this on the y-axis a bit so I can see the the eye spacing when you look at the eyeballs proper eye spacing of the eyes themselves is supposed to be one width of the eye so there should be a third eye fitting right in between but the eyeballs are a little smaller than that so if you have if you if you imagine a third eye it wouldn't quite touch the the other two but since this isn't my actual eye it's just the basically going to be the eyelid sitting and on top of that I'm I'm gonna leave it a little bit bigger just place it about here before I can go back into my into the face itself and then just move things around duplicate this for my eyes later on and hide it and then just control j this together need to apply the mirror modifier so I don't lose the lose the eye we don't want that and then if I go in and remesh things could have just pressed ctrl r we get something that is a decent block out for the eye sometimes I just go in with the clay brush and put in this volume but doing it which is quicker but doing it the way I did it right now saves me a bit more time down the line and I mentioned earlier that I want to talk a bit about attractiveness and what makes for attractive facial features so I've established most of the forms now at least in like rough block out so now I can talk about that a little bit more because I've got more of visual representation so there are people who conduct attractiveness research and most of what I'm going to talk about comes from that and this is carried out by for example orthodont or orthodontist but also psychologists for example and I've just lost connection to the tablet let me just try no it's back it's back okay uh tablets back so fingers crossed so yeah facial tractors research one one concept that comes from that is something called averageness averageness can be a bit of a misleading term because when we say averageness in that sense we're not talking about an average looking person we're talking about a person who has features that are averaged across the population so no real outliers to visualize that a little bit you might have people with a very long nose like this in a population you might have people with a very short nose like this in a population and then if you average out the entire population you get something like this and if you do that this for all facial features for example you might have people with very wide spaced eyes people with very close set eyes and if you average that out across the population you get something like this and this creates a few proportion rules that we can use for example we want to have about equal facial thirds which means that from the bottom to the of the chin to the bottom of the nose from there to the brow line and from there to the hairline not the top of the skull but the hairline we want those to be equally sized also with male characters we want the jaw ideally to be about 90 to 100 percent of the width of the cheekbones which are the widest part of the face and the distance of the outer corner of the eyes is about the same as the distance from the brow to the mouth. Now if we create a high-average-ness face this is going to be a character that's quite good looking quite pleasing to look at but they're going to have because by definition their face lacks any outstanding features they're also going to look quite forgettable and boring so what we need to do is we need to diverge from that average a little bit and we need to do so in an educated manner so we get desirable features on our character and there are multiple ways to do this the way I'm going to focus on today because it's something that's a good starting point and not too hard to explain within the timeframe that we have is sexual dimorphism so features that differ between men and women so if you're creating a male character you can make features a little bit more masculine and if you create a female character you can make things a little bit more feminine so some very dimorphic areas would be the brow line the jaw the nose and by just making those a bit more sexually dimorphic you can create a more striking more interesting looking character I've established the overall proportions pretty well right now so I think we can go on and decrease the the voxel density to create some more topology the rule of thumb there is to always use as small a poly count as you can get away with at this stage you're sculpting at beginner sculptors tend to have way way too many polygons and then the mesh becomes very difficult to control very lumpy and then when you smooth things out you might smooth it out too aggressively and then you get rid of all the facial features you've spent a lot of time trying to develop so you can really help yourself out by leaving the poly count a bit lower for as long as you can manage and now I'm just going to go in and start refining more of my secondary forms once again just using the draw sharp to draw in the the lines and then I add some clay to it once I'm happy with the with the planes that I've created and then with the clay brush I can make things just look a bit more a bit more flashy a bit more natural and then I can also use the smooth brush to do that a little bit but as I said before we need to be careful when smoothing our mesh because with the smooth it's very easy to just completely destroy your forms and you see right here I'm just smoothing on one form at a time I never go from like across multiple forms with my smooth brush of course now I'll also smooth very heavily but I don't do this I stay here smooth this a little bit then I go here and smooth over there and now I can put in my nostril when you look at the nose from below the nostrils tend to be closer together in the front and they are in the at the base of the nose and they're pretty much a little bit bean shaped like this so you've got these two little beans facing each other and that creates the shape for the nostril don't want the base the wing of the nostril to be too thick which right now it is so I'm just going to bring in this plane again and then I can polish things a little bit and maybe take out some of the mass here all right then I pull this down a little bit because ideally you want then the angle of the nose here at the bottom to be about 90 degrees and then I can just create a bit more of a taper and right now our the tip of our nose is a little bit too thick so I can adjust that somewhat and then I'm just adjusting the silhouette a little bit making that a bit cleaner before going in here with the polish and just adding some more mass to this area so we've got the nasal label fold here which kind of runs down the face and the circular pattern around the mouth we don't want to define that too much because then we tend to age our characters of course if you if you want to create an older character that's that's what you want to do but right now I'm not looking to do that so yeah some forms you just have to be quite careful with as I draw in the lips I have created the philtrum here which is this kind of u-shaped fold that runs down from the nose to the lips and then the upper lip curve is almost like this Batman logo with the little u shape in the middle and then these arcs here and then the line in the in between the lips where they meet kind of mirrors that shape but the curves a little bit flatter and the u shape is a bit wider so we have this kind of gesture going on and then I look at it from below again to make sure my curvature is still working well looking at it from the side I want my the corner of the lips to line up with the eyeball so I'm going to pull it back a little bit more and then for now I'm pretty happy with with the lips themselves the mouth still looks a bit off it kind of looks a bit beak like maybe like a botched lip top and that's something you all often see in beginner sculpts and the reason for that is that there is a lot of tissue around the lips that is still missing so I'll just go in with the clay brush and add that so it's important that the lips tuck into the corner of the mouth here there's there are quite a few muscle insertions that move the lips and they all insert in this point or a lot of them do at least and that creates this this bulge here which having that creates a bit more of a natural shape in the lips you can see that this already a bit better coming in with my draw sharp again and establishing these these forms a little bit more and then you've got this volume here at the below the lips which kind of moves out and back and you've got this these two convex shapes here and then the the concave shape in the middle and I'm just going to pull this back a little bit because otherwise when I look at it from three quarters this silhouette is very straight and that's not what I'm looking for so I'll just move this back and then refine this form a little bit more and then I'm going to zoom out a little bit in a moment and look a bit more at the larger features overall proportions I think I saw earlier that from the side view from the profile view the face is still a little bit off so I want the forehead to be a bit more a bit more vertical so I just moved the skull forwards a little bit and maybe I will move the the mouth back a bit as well as the nose we don't want the mid-face to protrude so much like this we also don't want it to be too flat in a Caucasian person if we were sculpting an Asian person that would be a little bit different they tend to have flatter midfaces wider cheekbones and now that I've touched on ethnicity I also want to mention that a lot of what I'm talking about regarding attractiveness is based in Western beauty standards other cultures prefer other features for example I talked about this quite square jawline but if you look at for example k-pop culture they tend to have k-pop singers tend to have these very oval jaw shapes which is just because that's more the beauty standard in in eastern Asian countries but yeah beauty standards are a bit tricky because in some some other cultures they tend to also use Western beauty standards a little bit because of colonialism which is of course a tricky issue I'm not going to touch on that now and then I can just adjust the mass of the cheek area a little bit basically flatten things out with the clay brush a bit adjust my volumes I still need a bit more mass here at the end the masseter muscle which is the large chewing muscle here in the in the side of the mouth because when I look at it from three quarters I want this to be not as aggressive on the same token I can also just take away a bit of the cheekbone here and then define that plane a bit better smooth things out a little bit to get some more natural features but yeah overall I think this is looking pretty decent I'm going to add like an other little plane in here because we don't want the jawline to be too sharp because it's not just the bone that creates the jawline it's also the tissue that sits on top of it like all the muscle especially here in the back with the masseter muscle that I mentioned already and then I don't want this fold to run too deep so I'm going to fill that in a little bit to create some more mass here at the bottom of my of my jaw and sometimes even at this like higher poly count I like to just come in with my draw a sharp brush quite aggressively and just draw in these lines and smooth them out basically find my my primary forms again because I tend to find that these lines I established in the beginning that run down the face here they are very important if you want a person to look attractive which has something to do with facial leanness which is another important factor when it comes to attractiveness but once again average this is important you usually don't want your characters to look too lean otherwise you get something like like what they do in the modeling industry which is a pretty sickly look and doesn't look healthy so I go for more of a healthy leanness level maybe screwing it towards athletic a little bit and then I think we should work on the forehead a little bit more especially with men you've got these large protrusions here created by the brow and then we can add some more complexity to these to these planes I wish I had more time to really go into detail with the with the planes I'm creating but unfortunately there's there's just not enough time for that so I can't explain every single thing that I am sculpting but if you want to know more about it I'm going to be walking around here until it's more afternoon and I'll be happy to talk to anyone who's interested in this now I'm just going to refine the features here a little bit and I I've been wondering for a long time when I started sculpting how to how to make a person look attractive and I there there are a lot of resources that helped me create more realistic looking faces for example this planes approach that I'm using right now but what that didn't really help me with was all right so I want I want this character for my portfolio to look really good I want them to be very eye catching it didn't really help me with that so yeah diving into all this attractiveness research has helped me with that get a better understanding of of what features I actually want to create in my characters because we all have an instinctive knowledge of what looks attractive because when we look at an attractive person of course that is somewhat subjective but when we see an attractive person we usually know it but maybe we can't explain what makes them look attractive so as artists analyzing that and then making more educated decisions with our sculpts can be very helpful right now when I look at it from this perspective I can see here on this side the og curve which is what you call this curve right here is very pronounced which is not really what I'm going for right now there are people who look like that but it creates this very hollow cheek look which is not what I'm trying to do right now so I'm just going to create some more mass in this area and once again I'm just going to bring back this plane and just doing that helps me visualize what's happening quite a lot and often when doing these one-hour sculpts because I've done a few of them in preparation for this talk just doing that was already enough to fix my issues if whatever they were because often just that the planes weren't as defined anymore was already the problem and even if that's not the case just having them in there again simplifies the shapes and helps me troubleshoot what's going on maybe with proportion or other things all right I'm going to start working on the eyes in just a moment still want to just to find the cheeks a little bit better and then maybe add some more curvature to the lips because right now they're very very straight some things we're not touching on today in regards to attractiveness are things like skin health healthy looking clean looking skin is it's a big health indicator and and makes people more attractive but that's not something that we need to concern ourselves in this stage because now we're just sculpting and the other thing is symmetry since we have a button for that we don't really need to worry about it what I do want to say about symmetry though is that when you have perfect symmetry like 100 symmetrical like we created right here that that tends to look a bit artificial so at the end of of the sculpt we usually want to break that symmetry a little bit and if you do that you can and you shouldn't just just do it randomly you can do things like use the symmetry to create a slight resting facial expression so you could do something like tuck up one corner of the mouth a little bit to give your character a bit of a smirk and that helps us also like convey more personality for our character and things like that because at the end of the day um as characters we were also storytellers and we want to tell people certain things about about our character uh in regards to uh by by how they look of course uh that can also be used to all right wrong voxel size uh I tend to like I know you can adjust the voxel size also with the shortcut but I tend to not use it because I'm not as precise with it as uh when I just type it in so usually I then just end up typing it anyway um regarding the eyes as I said before we want the eye width uh the eye spacing to be the same as the width of the eyes themselves um right now they are protruding a bit much so I'm actually going to move the eyeball back a bit on the y-axis before coming in here and then doing the same thing just with the grab brush making sure that I've got the right curvature and then I'm going to fill this in I'm going to check how much time I still got left because we started a few minutes late okay I didn't start a timer um whoop so for the the male eye I like to go for this kind of squinny look and that's simply uh because red pit has got eyes like that and that do this gorgeous and of course that's a bit of a joke but um that touches on something else I wanted to mention which is uh reference of course reference for artists is very important so if you want to sculpt um attract looking characters you need to look at attract looking people and they're certainly uh worse examples for that than and red pit um and that touches on something else of course right now I'm not using reference I don't have the time to to be looking at things while I'm also explaining to you what I'm doing um but ideally of course if you create a character you want to be using reference and also some other things that I'm doing that maybe aren't ideal is if you want to create with stylized characters it's a little bit different but if you want to create um realistic looking faces the forms are very subtle and to get subtle forms it's very helpful to use a smaller brush with a weaker strength and then just building your forms up very carefully and slowly and that way you get a lot of a lot of subtlety baked right into them from the start um but yeah once again I only have 50 minutes so I have to brute force it and do broad strokes to get results quickly I feel like right now my eyes are probably a bit too small so I'm just going to clear my mask and just pulling them a little bit to make them bigger and ideally I would want to have a bit more time to adjust them but I think we are about to run out in a few minutes which is also why I've started talking and explaining what I'm doing a bit yeah a bit less because I need to focus on getting this eye area right and the eye area is very very subtle and that makes uh makes it quite tricky because often there are small things in there that are off and that just makes the whole eye area look very weird and sometimes it's not even if you've got something like that it's not even the area of the scope that you're uh they're working on itself it might be something like the surrounding features having having wrong proportions because as I said in the beginning uh faces uh facial features don't exist in isolation they all exist in context with each other so facial harmony is very important um you can have people that divert very strongly from this average but they still the the averageness that I talked about earlier but they still look super attractive uh just because they've got great facial harmony and that's things like for example if you've got a very wide jaw but you've also got the cheekbones to match that's better than uh for example having very wide cheekbones and a very narrow jaw because it just works better together or um if your if your eyes are if you've got a longer face um larger eyes tend to look better because they they uh make up for that uh proportion a little bit of course uh beauty is a bit of a tricky subject I try to focus on it mainly just in art sense um regarding like the the the characters that I work on um but yes studying that has has made me come across a lot of superficial stuff about looks and a lot of this facial research is used to tell people what kind of facial surgeries they should get to look better and so some really toxic stuff so when you if you if you decide to look more into facial attractiveness be aware that there is a lot of very weird shit on the internet um just gonna adjust this a little bit um I'm going to also quickly put in my eyebrows um because we are used to looking at people with eyebrows all day long people without eyebrows are quite rare so seeing them really helps us read the face a little bit better just put in some of these squiggles right here to basically suggest that there's hair and then once I've got those I maybe can adjust the the brow line a little bit more um some things I didn't talk about regarding the eyes um there's something called Campbell tilt which refers to the angle between the inner and outer corner of the eye ideally the outer corner of the eye would be eight degrees higher than the inner corner so what you can do when you do a sculpt this you can put in a model in here maybe a plane or an edge and you can just rotate it eight degrees and use that as a a reference if you want to go for these idealized proportions and angles um and also there's something called scleral show which means that the sclera the white part of the eye is visible below the iris and ideally there is no scleral show but it is a very calm thing most people have scleral show so it's also not a uh a deal breaker and lastly I want to say that we don't need to make all our characters super attractive um it can be helpful when you have like a main character and you really want to make make them stand out but um I think there there are tons of ways to make characters look interesting uh without just adhering to these perfect beauty guidelines um they can just these guidelines can just be helpful um to understand facial attractiveness a little bit better to um create a baseline from which then you can diverge um so yeah don't be afraid to to give your characters flaws because uh ultimately that's what makes people interesting um but being able to sculpt a perfect character really helps with then um when you add flaws doing it in a very controlled way and in a very educated way um and using those to maybe say certain things about your character like if you add a scar you can tell a lot of history and things like that so um do I still have time or or okay then what I also like to do is I usually like to sketch in some hair just because um guys with hair tend to be more attractive I'm sorry um so I measure out my facial thirds with my finger to find the hairline and then I can just sketch that in and ideally men have a square or m-shaped hairline uh while women usually have more of a rounded hairline like this very broadly speaking so I go for this uh slight m shape but pretty square-ish and then I can just come in with a with an aggressive clay brush and just create these strands I'm going to do like just a swept back hairstyle right now because I can do that in symmetry and it's a bit quicker but basically I just add a bit of volume here and of course uh with hair you want to do that a separate object ideally just doing it in the sculpt immediately for time reasons and if you do character for production you're also going to do hair cards or curves or whatever but having a clay block out for your hair can be very helpful in finding where you want to place the cards especially if you put a little more time into it than I'm doing right now and you already used the clay to really define the direction of your strands this is a lot faster than placing cards so it helps a lot with iteration on the hairstyle and that can can make it much easier than to place cards or curves however you want and uh yeah I think this pretty much it this all we have time for so we didn't get to do the ears but I hope you enjoyed the presentation I hope you learned something and if you've got any questions or just want to chat I'll be walking around here don't hesitate to come up to me and yeah let's have a chat thank you very much enjoy the conference