i recently saw at cg-talk a wonderful image, which was a painting based on a zbrush model, and i thought i want to try that myself. i am going to do a portrait of a princess, and have modeled her head, and will probably some of her jewellery as well, and plan to paint all other ... and a friend suggested to do it as wip here, so i hope you enjoy me watching at work and find for yourself some useful tips and ideas i intend to sprinkle in while i go
so first some wires. i built from zspheres basic mesh (sorry i forgot to save the zspheres) and then used only transform/edit/move to push vertices into place.
in first step i concentrated mainly on putting features to where they should be approximately, like ear top is about at brow line, ear bottom about nose bottom, and such ...
then in second step i subdivided (and did NOT smooth) and refined features to get more feminine forms ... again, only transform/edit/move tool and here often with draw setting=1 to be able to push single vertices instead of many vertices ...
in last step again subdividing, pushing vertices a little, more subdividing, pushing vertices and then smoothing (i think i did twice). when smoothing later the advantage is that the basic form kept stable, whereas when you use smoothing very early the basic form might change drastically if not enough polygons available and you have to redo some of your modeling ...
so far i had modeled with quickedit+polyframe view on to see the polygons, now having the mesh as fine as i want i switch off quickedit view and have smooth view on to see how it will look when rendering, and this is now time to do finer details, like nose wings, lips, inside of ear etc ...
and in this step of modeling i also used with very low zadd setting the transform/edit/draw tool ... but only very rarely, since i do not like that it tends to make the mesh untidy and i wanted this time a clean mesh too ... (btw the head has a little over 26000 polys, so is still not too heavy)
oh yes, and it is a very good idea to use the transform modfiers x, y, or z to restrict the movement of points into one direction while modeling (and changing that as needed) this gives a lot of control over what you are doing, in particular if you turn your model away from the standard views left/front/top ...
and here is the basic scene setup and first try on lightning ... she still does not have the expression i want her to have, but i hope i understand how to do it as soon i give her eyes and eyebrows ...
... and yes, 121 very welcome, as always