Unit 9: Adaptation - Finding the "Front"

Hello Everyone,

This week has been a bit of a love hate journey but bar a few minor developments and my night car stage 1 stuff will be ready to show the masses. The cars are going a little slow (as I knew they would) but I should have that sorted by this weekend. Anyway to keep people happy I thought I would create another post which I wasn't going to bother with but it was a bit of a journey so why not. You will have to excuse the title of this post but I couldn't put it any other way because as far as I'm concerned this is not a full profile it is just a part of a profile.

I was going to save all final head developments for the expression sheets post but I thought it would be nice to show how I found my Drivers face. The real trick here was "adapting" - yes I used that word a piece of 3/4 concept art into a flat face. Now sure you could do it with lines and map out the details or do it from sight. Of course me being me, I found another way which I'm sure isn't official but I think it worked here. I'm not going to lie I was sceptical when I was figuring it out but the face that emerged started looking more and more like my driver.

Believe it or not the exploits actually began in 3D.

Well the image above shows 2 images, my final head (slightly changed again to make it dimensional - Alans advise) and a crude naff outline mapping out the essential details. I didn't want to over complicate the look I just wanted something I could use to map his features. I was able to be objective establishing his chin as a strong foreground. The cheek bones supersede the jaw line ever so slightly, the nose is prominent over the eyes and mouth - this detail I adjusted slightly. His combed back hair was just a basic shapes - as I said avoiding all detail at this point.

The next stage in the process had me going into Zbrush and loading up an image plane. The main issue was turning the model to fit it. I rotated my crude face and "adapted" it somewhat into his by crunching the features. As I said at this point my only goal was to get the key features in their correct location. From there I took a face on render and threw it into Photoshop. I then noticed other slight anomalies so I just cut and moved the key features of the face. I would use these as building blocks to construct my front profile, which was somewhat accurate with the 3/4 view.

Next I went back to the root of the design finding what constructed the face I was planning to draw from different angles (and in different expressions eventually). I then added in basic primitives to represent the skull and of course his hairline. I was constantly referring to the 3/4 image at this point because some of the features from the model did not line up despite being adjusted to the image. Still it  wasn't much of a stones throw from what would become the final rendition. It just bugged me how sometimes I could not get different sides of the face so I thought further investigation was needed.

Finally (image above) what I had was a somewhat accurate front profile of my Drivers face. Using the primitive shapes I just blocked in facial curves to stop it from being quite so rigid and again adjusted his features to match the 3/4 concept image. As I stated above there was a detail I changed from the main concept image and that was the size of his eyes. I kind of feel that there is more personality in him if his eyes consume more of his face. Other then that everything is the same, the big nose, the small mouth, the strong jaw and the crazy combed back hair.

Well I hope onlookers enjoyed this little journey into yet more head development of the Driver but never the less it is still pertinent to the project. The next stage will undoubtedly be to get onto doing more and more concept for my cars. I do have a number of things to do towards their development but I think things will pickup once I get into the flow of drawing them a personality as opposed to just drawing them. Next week I will be looking to start modelling my Driver so most of my Pre-Prod will end this week including a lot of concept art so be on the lookout for that!

Well I will be back with more very soon!
xXStItChXx