50–65cm Dolls Learning Dollmaking: Lilsun AKA Lily

I recently received a resin printer as a gift, and also impulsively bought a wig that happened to be the perfect hairstyle for a character of mine, Lilsun, (widow's peak and decently strong sideburns, not something I'd expect to find out of the blue), so, naturally, my first impulse was to make his doll form. I have a lot of prior art experience and I tooled around with tinkerCAD some years prior (for some unserious high-school stuff) but 3D sculpting is new to me. I am at the point where I am ready to print the head, but I would like to share my progress thus far and also note some pitfalls I had and what I learned so that it may help someone in the future or just be a neat thing for me to look back on.
First off, we have the design:

He's a lanky guy. I designed him taking inspiration from Miracle Doll and bonelace, and the joints specifically were designed using some of the tutorials bonelace uploaded. I wanted him to be decently flexible, hence the 3 part torso and double joints. I'm not sure what else to say about my intentions with the design, but feel free to ask me any questions. This is a character with severe burn scars across both arms and shoulders, so I will probably end up making a version integrating that. For now, I just wanted to get shape and structure across.

Next, I tried making the head using only my drawn reference and other drawings I've made of him. I wanted to make a head first both to learn the basics of zbrush and also just to have something to print and put on another body I have so as to feel like I accomplished something.
Using my drawn references exclusively was a mistake. A big one.

There's a lot of problems with it (not shown, but the cranium is completely misshapen). I couldn't get the eyes to look human, nevermind look like him, and the whole thing is just...off. The proportions are ok and it was probably salvageable but...idk? He's having a bad time. I couldn't get the frontal and profile views to match my doll schematic-if I changed one, the other became malformed. I started anew by making a skull using multiple references from different angles in a PureRef window (get pureref, it's life changing).

This gave me a refresher on head anatomy as well as an easily accessible starting point for making any head. I don't have much to say about it, other than that I will probably make a new one for my next head both as practice as well as make it far less rough. I cranked this out in the span of 3 hours.

This is all I have of the intermediate stage. The gist of it is that I used Clay Buildup to draw big, rough strokes over the skull in the direction that various facial muscles go. In this way I built up the face in all the right places. You can see it in the strokes, especially around the cheeks and forehead. However, at this point, I was using a photo reference for the face, the model Xing Ye who inspired Lilsun's appearance way back when.

At this point I've got the face at 90% of where I want it to be, the most important features being the flat, slightly wide nose, the epicanthic folds (and kinda large tear ducts, it's just a feature I like), and the emphasized cheekbones, brows, and jowls. Lips were fine until I left it alone for a few days and realized they were too thin, especially the upper lip.

At some point I hollowed out the head. I suggest watching a youtube tutorial on that because I didn't reinvent the wheel with what I did. My real troubles began at the cutting stage-it involved watching a lot of youtube videos, taking notes on said videos, and in the end making up my own method for cutting the head up because I couldn't make any one video work 100% for me.

(Ignore the ears, they came later).
I chose to do a faceplate instead of head and headcap. There are many reasons for this, but the gist of it is that I want to be able to swap faceplates very quickly and easily without having to go through the pains of jerking around with the head, the string tension keeping it there, and constant wig removal.
My cutting method, once I actually figured it out, was essentially using some cubes and a sphere to cut the face off the head via subtractive booleans(?). Booleans is honestly a bad word for it, but for those not in the know (like I was), it just means that I used one shape as a hole for another shape. I made a vaguely C-curve shaped thing out of three cubes, then used a sphere to delete any neck-related parts at the base of the face.
As to why the various youtube methods didn't work for me, the gist of it is that a lot of them will tell you to use the slice or even the select tools to basically separate the pieces, the Close Holes the resultant broken mesh. The problem was that Close Holes would, for me, at least, close the actual hollowing I did earlier. Which obviously breaks the sculpt entirely. Using the 3 cube construct was a pain, and I bet there's a simpler method, but that's what I eventually got working.

Here's some pictures of the head base thing. If you guessed that I made it by using the faceplate to cut a hole in the main head shape, you'd be right. If you guessed something else, and that something else is a better way of doing this, please let me know. This method is surprisingly fiddly. As you can see here, and in the faceplate photos, I also cut some magnet holes. the depth for these was a crapshoot, and I haven't looked into or discovered how to precisely measure the hole depth I'm making, especially when the size is bound to change in the slicer anyway? My only method here was making sure that I paired a shallow hole to a deeper one so that ideally, the magnet in the shallow hole would slot into the deeper one.



Lastly, I decided to make three versions of the head. The character is originally an elf, so 2 of the versions are with elf ears-one version has them detached, attachable via magnets (first pic), the second version has them attached. I prefer the attached version, But I want to explore all my options. The last version will be (attached) human ears, which I haven't done yet. I think I'd only go through the trouble of printing that version if there was somebody who wanted it, as I currently have no need for it.

Anyway, that's all I have right now. I am printing the head base and the attached ears faceplate as I write this, and after the head is done and dusted, I will probably take a break to work on other projects before returning to do the body.

 

Printed wrong file so the head printed much smaller than intended, but detail is good.

 

Thank you! I have the AnyCubic Photon Mono X6K.

 

Thanks! I recently reprinted him in the right size, but haven't gotten around to posting an update. Btw, nice to meet a fellow Zheng owner!

 

Printed a bigger head and took the supports off, but the two pieces do not fit each other. In the last pic I circled the reason why; I screwed up fitting the two pieces together while sculpting it (or rather, I cut them up in a very janky way...) and ended up with this odd ridge thing that I'd honestly thought wouldn't even show up in the print. I underestimated my printer. When I sand the head I will remove this bit. If it works, it'll be a most joyous day. But nonetheless, I think I will redo the entire cutting of the head, because I think it needs more work. I am also not entirely happy with the ears.

 

I began by making the body using Zspheres. I learned that trick from the Flipped Normals youtube channel. In this way I was able to build the skeleton using the drawing I made as a background, and from there I was able to convert it to a mesh, which allowed me to sculpt right on top of it. I have gotten the body to roughly the shape I want, but am currently stuck on getting even a rough version of the hands. Once that's done, it'll be the feet, then lots of refining. I highly recommend using the Zsphere over sketch route, it saved me countless hours as I did not have to sculpt the body from scratch nor fiddle with proportions and joints, as all of that was taken care of using the Zspheres with relative ease.