For You Are Beautifully and Wonderfully Made - All the Proportions of the Face
I've been learning about the proportions of the face recently and have just been completely amazed by the way (I believe at least) God made us and the design that is in just our faces. Things like the face being divided into three equal sections, yet the measurement starts at the hairline instead of the top of the head. There is absolutely no natural reason why this would be except for it is part of the artistic design of the face. Or how so much of the face is in thirds or halves. I wonder too if it's even possible for such things to come from complete randomness. Anyway, as I was learning about them I started to wonder what it would look like to follow each proportion exactly and here is the result. Since so much of the face is determined by the eyes and the width of the skull, I used the average size of the eyes (24mm) as well as the average width of the skull to get something that would at least be close to what a normal head would look like. Then I just went with reference images and the proportions for the rest of it. Since it is kind of a clay sculpture, I thought it would also be fun to try to make it look like clay and as though hands had formed it. You can see more about the workflow I used to make it look like clay below.
The rig and base retopologized head can be downloaded on Blendswap.com here: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/81213. Even though each proportion can change quite a bit from person to person, the rig does provide good guidelines as well as a very good checklist of things to look for when sculpting.
You can also see my Blenderartists post here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?381652-For-You-Are-Beautifully-and-Wonderfully-Made-All-the-Proportions-of-the-Face
The worflow I used on the project was to first sculpt the head using dyntopo, then retopologized it and applied a Shrinkwrap Modifier to a Multiresolution Modifier to keep all of the detail that was in the dyntopo mesh, then made it look like clay after that; so nothing new there. To actually make it look like clay, I used the scrape brush with a few settings changed, which I circled in the image below. So instead of just planing off the surface, it goes in a bit as well in kind of a bowl type shape, which seemed to work pretty well to make it look like hands had sculpted the base mesh.
To get the brush marks in the clay, I started out trying to use a texture with alpha set to blend mode mix, but quickly realized this wouldn't work very well because after a few strokes, the area is at the lowest color it can be, and is therefore just flat, as can be seen in the image below with the cube on the left side. I also tried changing the blend mode to multiply, but it does the same thing. In the end, what seemed to work best was to set the blend mode to mix and use a texture with the color ramp option turned on and the left side that would be the alpha part of the image turned to white and the right side changed to a little bit below white with the actual brush color set to 50% grey. The way that I understand this works is the pure white part of the ramp will be whatever color the brush is set to, in this case 50% grey, and the part that is below white will be darker than the brush color. So it basically puts the bump map's values back to grey and subtracts at the same time. So no matter how many times a spot gets brushed over, it will never become flat, which gives the results that can be seen on the cube on the right. Another thing that helped was to turn on a little bit of jitter just to add some randomness to the strokes.
One other thing I found to work pretty well was to use a cloud texture for the brush, as seen below, and just playing around with the ramp to get different effects. Although, since you have to have the spacing at 1%, it was pretty slow on a 4k texture. So I was really only able to use it in areas that started to look like I was using the same brush over and over again or areas of a clay sculpture that someone would use a small brush on.
A couple other notes I thought I would include in case they might help someone is that even though this: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?374697-Addon-Cycles-Multi-Tile-UDIM-non-destructive-painting&highlight=udim Multi-Tile UDIM add-on doesn't currently have support for the Blender Render, it still worked to use the idea and set up the materials and each textures' UVmaps manually to be able to paint the bump map with GLSL shading. So I basically had the resolution of an 8k texture with the speed of painting on a 4k texture.
Also, I've never used the Normal slot on the Layer Weight or Fresnel material nodes, but I had seen somewhere recently where someone tried to use it and thought I might as well try as well. What I found was using a normal map in it actually does seem to help the fresnel effect a bit because the bumps in the normal map are included more instead of just mainly using the base mesh for the effect. So I'll probably be using it more in the future.
And that's it, hopefully it all makes sense!