Superimposing for 3D Portraits
 

Here is a technique that some of you may find helpful if you are working in 3D. This is a bust I have roughed in

2. Create a new layer on your clay photo and copy/paste the reference photo into that layer.

3. Reduce transparency of the new layer to 50%. Drag the layer to the correct position and if needed, transform by scale until the bust is the same size as the underneath layer.

Now you can observe the areas that need more or less clay. Areas in red need to be reduced and areas in green need to be added to. As you can see, the ears need to come up and forward just a bit.
This method is especially useful if you don

Thanks for posting this Heidi. Do you compensate for the perspective? Actually the picture has perspective too. Nevermind. I work in computer 3D and we have a user view which is isometric and has no perspective that's why I asked that question.

Hi Josef,
I've never worked with any of the 3D graphics applications. What sort of things do you do with them? For fun or for work?
Getting the same perspective for both photos is key to get them overlaid correctly. Sculpting a head is a little tricky from photos since there are over 360 different perspectives you need to see and usually only have a handful of them. I don't know if I'll take on any more jobs where the photos submitted are few and bad quality. That just makes things so unnecessarily difficult. Twice, all I had to work from was one obituary photo from a newspaper.
For this one, I took the photos myself so I have lots of reference material. At 30 inches, it's also the biggest one I've ever made and I am having a ball. Here's a front view.

Heidi,

I have only made some sculptures from live model, so this will be a wild guess.
How about making a grid pattern on your background wall, like the ones the police uses when photographing criminals? They use horizontal lines. But if you make a grid and take the pictures from the same distance, you will have a direct reference between the model and your work.

Allan

Hmm,
Interesting idea Allan. It might even be helpful to lay a grid over some of the reference photos and print them off. How did people ever get by without digital photography? It's so darn useful.

Heidi,

This is so very interesting to see! Thank you for posting! So many (most) of us are flatlanders here, and it is wondrous to see your process.

I'm interested that you're sculpting at 150% - why is that? Does the over-life-size scale present a different set of challenges ( aside from having to lift the work-in-progress) ?

Hi Chris,

No real reason for the 150% other than I've never done a monumental and since I've been doing miniatures lately (25% life size) it is a nice change to spend some time at the other end of the spectrum.

Problems are that the max load for my stand is 100 pounds. I'm at about 120 here and it is fairly unstable, so I don't move it around. Another problem is the same as you would have working on a huge painting - you are working up so close to it that you constantly lose perspective and have to keep running to the back of the room to look at it.

Heidi, I work in computer graphics for computer game company. We model in 3D and animate them just like how Pixar does their characters but far less complex because game engines cannot handle really high polygonal count and detail. But technology is changing and soon you will see super realistic characters in a video game context.

Sometimes I do it for fun and pleasure of it but it takes more time than a pencil or paint brushes. But the results is always gratifying as in all different mediums.