Reply To: purpose of human project

[coyo]

One reason to create such a realistic human portrait (or to explore realism in general with CG) is not just to learn the technical process of creating such a thing but the research one needs to do, the questions one needs to ask, and the general theory behind what makes a CG object look convincingly real.

The human face is probably one of the things we, as humans, are most discerning about. We can almost instinctively tell when something is off or “wrong” about a portrait. We’ve all seen many excellent “realistic” sculpts that somehow, in some way, just miss being fully convincing. In this course, Kent has done a lot of the groundwork for us as far as research and forming the right questions we need to be asking. Using photos of real people as examples he breaks down all the small things that make a person look convincingly present in the environment. Then he takes that into Blender and shows us how to reproduce those tiny details that really start to create true realism.

Through this course, we are not just given knowledge but a method of thinking and questioning that we can apply to any other project. What makes a tree look real? What makes a cat look real? How about a plate of food? We are less critical about non-human objects but our realistic CG humans will need to be interacting with objects at the same level of realism at some point.

Another thing I got out of the course was how to break down what seems to be a large and intimidating project into straightforward steps. While I have a good bit of experience sculpting human heads, the way Kent adapted the Loomis method to sculpting was incredibly helpful for me as far as troubleshooting problem areas. I have taken quite a bit from what I’ve learned in the course and applied it to my real media sculpts and also entirely different types of projects done in Blender.