Bass Bawling

Something quick to learn face posing.

Uploaded December 2 2024

So, I've always liked this one album cover from Yoshihiro Naruse. The music itself on the album isn't all that good (I really only like the first 2 tracks), but I like the way his face is scrunched up and contorting. Which is perfect for me, since I'd like to learn to pose a character's face in blender.

I decided to make it using the TF2 character models. Heavy was the only character that had hair which looked similar to the original, so I used him. I got myself familiar with the pose controls (for the face it's just a bunch of sliders), then I moved on to lighting. The lighting for this was incredibly difficult. Getting the correct parts of the face to be in the right amounts of light and shadow was so hard I had to cheat a bit by boosting the contrast when rendering. The fact that this model didn't have the necessary cheek movements also didn't help. But, I did what I could and got this.

After that I decided I'd do some grease pencil work to make up for some of the missing face movement and because I think it looks cool. The lines on the face itself are all hand-drawn while everything else is procedural.

To finish it off I manually darkened the gaps in shadows with more grease pencil. There's so much contrast that you can't tell the difference between real shadow and the ones I penciled in.

There's still some stuff I'd prefer to fixed to consider it actually done like that weird triangle of no shadow on his cheek, but I've learned it's better to finish something rather than spend half a year perfecting it.