When I want to sculpt a face like someone ,At what stage should I start adjusting my facial structure? , After finished planes of the head 4 ? Because when i try to sculpt semi-realistic, it hard for me to adjust after finish the neck lesson. Thank you.
It's hard to set a specific line in the sand, it's all gray areas. But I'd say don't go into detailing if you're still not convinced you have hit your target in likeness. While you are keeping the features broad, is when you have room to fiddle around, move things, trash things over with big detail sizes. Kent is guiding you from scratch in the course, but I believe him and much of the character artist's start with a complete base mesh already modeled and they just begin adjusting it. That to say you're not always going to start from scratch, that's possibly only going to be the case while you are a beginner. So you can change and adjust even after everything has been modeled, the point is not to commit to detail because that is where things really get difficult to change around. I guess the getting to the neck is and stopping if you're not convinced you got the likeness right, is as good as parameter as any. Just remember, keep things broad as you work at first, so that it's easy to change and adapt to get to your goal, when you're satisfied you scale up and start detail passes.
I'm in agreement with Omar in that it's all sort of a gray area and also his comment about character artists usually starting with a base mesh.
Hopefully Kent will chime in here. If I remember correctly he describes the course as being more as a method to learn proper, generalized, proportions rather than a method to sculpt an exact likeness. It's incredibly important to learn those correct proportions early on so later, on actual likenesses, you can more easily see when and where things start to stray, save time, and avoid a great deal of frustration. From my own experience, I struggled with "chasing the form" on sculpts for a long time because I hadn't established correct proportions right away. Kent's course helped me be able to take a step back, identify the proportion errors I consistently made, and be able to correct them as they happened or avoid them completely (not that I still don't make mistakes - always learning).
Achieving a good likeness is really its own skillset. The HUMAN course establishes a good foundation to move in that direction. I would recommend working through the course without adding extra layers of difficulty - it's a pretty challenging course as it is. At the end you will have a good overview not only of basic facial proportions but also the subsequent workflow to achieve a realistic render.
All that said! If you do incremental saves prior to moving on to each big change in the mesh you will have one with the very general proportions blocked out plus some simple eye bulges. This one is going to likely be the best version to save off as a base mesh and use to start matching features to create a likeness. I would go so far as to do a quick retopology of this sculpt because it's easier to adjust low poly meshes and having some simple loops around the mouth and eyes will give you landmarks to track as you begin matching to your reference. This is the aforementioned "gray area" though and ultimately comes down to developing a personal workflow that feels good and gets the results you desire - which is something that happens over time.
Thank you very much for your reply. It was me who was in too much of a hurry. You guys are right that this is a course to understand the proper parts. Now I think I should go back and start again.
I tried to easily retopology planes of head to use as a base mesh and roughly adjust the shape It's OK. But when the proper proportions are not followed The human face started to turn into an alien. ^0^
* I apologize for using strange language. English is not my native language, so i use google translate. Thank you again for your kind and patient
Great question NNamton! I'd wait till later in the workflow. Either after you're done sculpting the majority of your head, before retopology - so end of chapter 1. Or you could match likeness after retopology, before detail sculpting (before the "Pore Detail Overview" lesson in chapter 2). In fact that might be the most efficient time because your sculpt is freshly optimized via retopo.
The reason being that, with a fully formed anatomical head, achieving likeness is simply a matter of moving facial features and proportions around till it matches your target. You could sculpt the likeness from scratch, which I used to do in my early years. And if you're new to sculpting the head, it's good practice to do it from scratch several times. But it's much easier to move around facial features when you have fully formed facial features already.