In my first article for the blog i talked a lot about the proportion of the body and head and the fact I used a proportional tool to help me. That section was based upon standard proportions ie the average person is 8 heads tall and each part of the body is so many head lengths. Is actually 7.5 but 8 is easier to work with .
I touched on my eyes, nose and mouth and alluded to the fact it was way more of a personal preference , there is a rule called the golden rule which lays out the mathematically perfect positioning of each component in relation to another.....way too complicated to be used in SL so I tweak and all alter until i get some thing that is pleasing to my eye.
I will attempt to explain my tweaking with the aid of some photos
.....sl head under the mesh one .... ewwww get the mesh head back on quick..... shudders
Basic head with no real thought just all in place so the proportional rig can work.
Eye spacing and size
too close together looks evil and is uncomfortable to look at ...
to far apart makes you look like an alien and again is uncomfortable to look at
too big and is out of proportion and is ohh wowww bug and
too small makes your whole face look wrong .
So it is getting a happy medium of all of those .... of course once you start working on the nose and mouth you have to alter your eyes but if you got them close to what you think is right then it is small adjustments you have to make and not large ones. With the photos i have gone to extremes to show the point i am making.
Nose the most difficult of all to get right. I have seen avas who look stunning in full frontal view but come around and look at profile
and it is OMG has she gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson... nose is squashed over all over the place .. upper bridge too high or lower one too low and every combination in between with others the nose is too long and starts to look like Pinocchio
The nose can dominate a face and if it is not right it can totally destroy what would otherwise be a very pleasing face. For me i alter on full face, turn and look at profile and alter before returning to full frontal , almost like a potter creating some thing on his wheel and with each alteration the slider change gets smaller and smaller
mouth and mouth position
mouth position to low and it creates a very big upper lip, where the old west hung their mustaches. it also destroys the other proportions of your face, chin not deep enough .
to high and makes the nose look way to big and chin way too deep.again a very male characteristic. or rather the chin depth is.
Again it is trying to get the proportions right in relation to your face and face shape and again it is frontal . profile.. front profile until you are happy.
After all that it can still be totally wrong and this is where personal preferences come way to the fore and why i call creating an ava art as just with a sculpture or painting you create some thing that is pleasing to look at and basically is what you the creator likes.
This last stage can take me weeks and many slight alterations as i might be dancing and some part of my shape just doesn't look right so i alter and then go back to observing. I also am always looking at other avas and seeing what looks good with them and again it is what is pleasing to my eye and i often tweak my own ava as they have done some thing that i haven't thought of but would work with my shape .
This stage of creation is all very subjective but the work to my mind is worth it as lets face it a modern mesh head, body , skins and shading tattoos don't come cheap and being a Scot i like to get my monies worth out of my purchase.
The opinions in this article are my own and i know a lot of people will not agree and others will be thinking DOH i already know all that but my purpose in writing these articles is just to help others to take a fresh look at how they go about creating their avatar rather than just buying a head , body and using the default shapes which are never set up properly ... a head creator only concentrates on the head and while they do a body as well as it is part of a basic shape they don't spend a lot of time on it, just look at the hands and feet for starters.
No comments:
Post a Comment