I have been working on a realistic face study in bursts for a few months now and have put together a final render. Special thanks to a few of the members on BA for their suggestions and insights in the WIP forum (available here). I'm seriously motivated to join other people's WIP threads because of how helpful it was.
Portraits and faces have always fascinated me so I thought it would be most meaningful to create one in full 3D! I first studied the topology of the model used in Sintel to guide how I constructed the face (topology render farther down page). This was one of my first times using Cycles, so I heavily relied on tutorials from Blender Cookie to learn about various areas such as projection painting, sculpting, and cycles nodes. I'm now convinced you can learn anything on the internet!
When I find another chunk of free time, I'll be wanting to combine this new face asset with python scripting and drivers to make a facial animation system. What would be even cooler would be to create a base layer of animation through a motion capture system, which could be possible even inside Blender considering the improvements in its motion tracking feature. Please share if you have experience with this.
