Whenever I try to create a young face for a male, a teenager, it ends up looking like someone older.  I've been trying for months to create characters for a comic.  Hiro comes out looking too toonish, M3, D3 and M4 just don't look like teenagers.

Any tips for younger faces beyond rounder head, larger head?

Quote - Whenever I try to create a young face for a male, a teenager, it ends up looking like someone older.  I've been trying for months to create characters for a comic.  Hiro comes out looking too toonish, M3, D3 and M4 just don't look like teenagers.

Any tips for younger faces beyond rounder head, larger head?

A pic of what you have so far might be helpful.

Smaller jaws, larger eyes, larger foreheads (cranium) in proportion to the face, smaller noses, less pronounced cheeks, less facial lines/wrinkles, larger ears, etc..

Take a look at some artist's sites and look for proportional guides for young faces.  I'm sure there have to be some out there.

A few ideas for younger faces...

1. Soften. You mention "rounder head" but this must go beyond general head shape... soften the cheeks, eliminate/reduce angularities, especially in jaw area.

2. Pay attention to the nose. The nose tends to point further downward and have the bridge come out with age... so push the nose tip upward a bit, and recess the bridge.

3. Try making the lips a bit fuller.

But it's probably most important to look at photographs. Find a photo of a child or teen that has a general resemblance to the character you're working on. Then compare what's different. It's very easy to overlook specific features when dealing in the abstract.

I find making M4 look younger is a lot easier than making him look about 35.
Whenever I fiddle around, I end up with something that looks 20 or so. Really bloody annoying lol.

Here's an example, but to me he looks 19ish, early 20's.  The character is 15ish.  He is heroic/athletic, the descendant of Hercules and Achilles, but just a kid. 

Silke: I suspect getting the older look (well, to a point - 60 is a different story than 35) right has as much to do with the texture as with the morph. I think what I did here is just the DAZ hi-res textures though: http://www.believable3d.com/gallery/pitchfork.jpg (I admit I paid more attention to the face than the body.)

flibbits: I would lighten up on the squareness of the chin, as well as the angularity of the jaw - go for a softer curve toward the ear. I'd say the cheek lines are also too angular and pronounced.

Yeah, kids tend to have much softer, rounder faces.

Timag, I seem to have either way older than 35 results, or much younger looking.
I don't mind young, but... I prefer seeing a bit of character and hardness in a guy's face.
At 35 that really only just starts to be noticable, still looking young, but with character.

Now if only I could get it into the faces I'm trying to render lol

Yes... again, I think texture has something to do with it. The M4 hi-res texture is very versatile, though.

If you can get both ends of the spectrum, that's probably a hint that the tweaking needs to be a little more gentle. I suspect we tend toward caricature: we know certain tendencies characterize youth and age respectively, and then we overdo those tendencies.

If I ever do released characters, my plan is to focus on "Believable Mid-Life" - mostly, the 30-50 age bracket. I don't know how many other people will want that sort of thing, mind you... doesn't really go all that well with the typical soft p0rn and faerie renders.... :)

"
flibbits: I would lighten up on the squareness of the chin, as well as the angularity of the jaw - go for a softer curve toward the ear. I'd say the cheek lines are also too angular and pronounced."

I'm spinning dials, not sculpting it.

Yes, I assumed that. But you can do these things with dials (not to the same degree as sculpting of course, although you can control some things more easily with morphs unless you're really good....)

This is a little better, but it's still not there.

Quote - This is a little better, but it's still not there.

The neck is too big for the age you're trying to hit.  Soften up the angle between the chin and bottom of the jaw.  It needs a gentler curve there.  You can still have the chin as pronounced without such a sharp transition.  Do those two things and you'll be fairly close.  After you have done that, see how the cheekbones look.  Pronounced cheekbones would generally have a sallow hollowing of the space between the cheek and lower jaw in an adult.   So, you "might" have to decrease how pronounced they are a little bit to keep the rest of the face from being too angular. 

The look you want is that "transition" phase from youth to adult.  So, it's not easy.

"Soften up the angle between the chin and bottom of the jaw.  It needs a gentler curve there."

Not sure what that means. 

• Neck is smaller.
• Increased the head size.
• Decreased the cheekbones by decreasing heart shape dial.

It's better, but some things like lowering the eyes or widening the distance between the eyes make him look younger, but distort the face with lots of creases and lines.

I don't know if this is a little known fact or not, but noses and ear's never stop growing in men. The younger they are the smaller they are. The older they are the larger they are.

And the more hair therein? ;D

Quote - And the more hair therein? ;D

Yeah I wasn't gonna mention that. I hate having to trim nose and ear hair with a passion! :tt2:

Smaller ears, moved them down a bit.  Increased the jaw curve to not make it so angular.

Pushing the eyes down makes him look younger, but adds serious lines under the eyes so I had to leave that as it is.

Lord Amighty lose the subtle chin cleft .

And pull in and round out the chin.

I dunno, that's just my gut reaction

I'm just tryin to help

This is worlds better, flibbits. I still think the corners of the chin need a bit more softening, if you can manage it. But I'd say we're definitely looking at mid-teens now.

He looks to be around 12 or 13 now but they're right about the chin. Think babyfat, not muscle jock.

"And pull in and round out the chin."

I can't.  I've tried every adjustment with the chin I can think of, but can't pull it in or remove the cleft without adding all kinds of weird indentations and lines.

I tried making the chin larger rather than smaller - chin size was -1, now I tried 1, but it still has that chiseled look.  Tried chin wider, thinner, jaw rounder, less round - can't get it.

It seems to me if there were a dial for chin length or height, that would fix it, but there is no such dial.

It would help a lot if we knew which base figure this one was from.

Just for a real-life example, I pulled out Bruce Campbell's biography, appropriately enough titled If Chins Could Kill.  He's got the kind of chin you're aiming for as an adult and the book has pictures of him as a kid.

Basically, the main problem is that you have a mix of child and adult features in your examples.  To get the best one, take your first version and get rid of the chin cleft: keep it big, but make it round instead of flat on the bottom (and certainly not with a cleft).

Gonna have to disagree with you on the chin cleft Keith. I've seen babies with cleft chins, but at that age they're more like dimples than heavy creases.

It's M4.

The thing is I didn't add a chin cleft so I don't know how to get rid of it.

 The last one is good. Thing is, I don't think it looks like a teen now. He looks like 10-12 to me now.

Generally, in a teenager, there's no baby fat left. Perhaps it's just here, those things do vary globally, but he looks too young to be a teen, now.

Good job btw, considering it's all dial spins!

"Generally, in a teenager, there's no baby fat left. Perhaps it's just here, those things do vary globally, but he looks too young to be a teen, now."

Yes I agree, so I've passed teen and gone too young.  ARGH!

It think it's a matter of what I said earlier: "If you can get both ends of the spectrum, that's probably a hint that the tweaking needs to be a little more gentle. I suspect we tend toward caricature: we know certain tendencies characterize youth and age respectively, and then we overdo those tendencies." You're largely working with the right parameters, just need to be a little more gentle. But you're very close, IMO, especially if you're aiming for a young teen.

OK.. I don't know if this is of any help, but since I like doing morphs, I've assembled a little pack of 8 face-shaping morphs for M4. Some to make him look younger. The thumbnail shows all 8 loaded at full, of course you can combine them as you see fit. The morphs are: - SoftenFace

• JawCornersIn
• ChinCleftRemove
• NoseYounger
• ChinSmaller
• CheeksSofter
• MouthSofter
• ChinHigher

They're absolutely free ^_^ and available on my Homepage.

They do not require any other morph packs - it's all brand new morphs.

Have Fun!

Bleh. Of course my site has chosen to be down at the moment. It's probably up again really soon (it's rarely down at all) - but the morph pack is available in Rosity's freestuff now and the link there works!

In regards to the OP's morph, I think it's looking very good.  The reason the eye lowering helps the age is because it increases the perceived size of the forehead/cranium and lowers the perceived size of the lower face.  

I did a quick search for facial proportions based on age and this paper might be of help.

http://www.geradts.com/anil/ij/vol_008_no_002/papers/paper003.html

Some good, general tips in there about the differences between an adult face and a child face.

On another note:

Quote -
OK.. I don't know if this is of any help, but since I like doing morphs, I've assembled a little pack of 8 face-shaping morphs for M4. Some to make him look younger. The thumbnail shows all 8 loaded at full, of course you can combine them as you see fit. The morphs are:...

Hiyas trekkiegirrl!  This is a bit OT but..

I've been trying to pack a bunch of morphs I made for the "Klingon" thread.  I'd really like to make them pose/injection morphs instead of just squishing the object files.  But, I'm having little success it seems.  I'm an intelligent guy but, for some reason, I'm just not "getting it" in regards to making redistributable morph injection/pose packs.  Can you point me to a good, easy to understand, tute on that?

PS - There are a LOT of morphs.. it's basically a "Build your own Klingon Forehead of the Week" morph pack.  It includes morphs for everything from the nose on up, all separate yet working together and includes two "Base Morphs" that can be used by themselves or built upon to create a more robust, intimidating forehead.. :)   Redistributing all those stripped .obj files would be "sloppy" IMO.

 Morkonan.. I wish I could help you. But I've never figured out how to make injectable morphs myself. I'm relying totally on Blacksmith3D for this, I make the morph with it and it makes the injections L (rather crude actually, since it as far as I can tell just writes the whole thing, deltas and all into a PZ2 - but hey... it WORKS)

There's a program called InjectionMagic at Daz. I bought it but have never really used it (more fool I) because most of the time Blacksmith does what I need. It should be able to help you with the injections though. At least I think so. Since I'm just getting back into Poser again after more than a year's absense.. I may be remembering some things wrong :)

Simple method for making PMDINJection's:

1st: Use Morph Manager to remove all original morphs from character and save a morphless CR2 for working with. 2nd. Load all your OBJ Morphs onto the new blank character in Poser. 3rd: Turn on "Use External Binary Morphs" in Poser Preferences. 4th Save figure back to Library thus creating a PMD file with all your morphs in it. Lastly, create a PZ2 file with the following code to call and load your PMD morphs on any figure:

Quote -
{
version
{
number 4
}
injectPMDFileMorphs :runtime:!PMDFiles:JamesHead.pmd
}

 Yeah the PMD method would work for anyone with Poser 6 or 7. I've used it on Poser specific characters, like Simon and so on. But as far as I know these PMD morphs doesn't work in DS - and they certainly does not work in earlier Poser versions. 

So generally, it's not much of an option to me, except when we're talking Poser Only-figures :)

It's a good tip though, if compatibility isn't an issue :)

Actually there's a DS Plugin for loading PMD morphs now so the only "Compatibility" issue is with Poser 5 and earlier.

Cool. I had a feeling there might be a plugin, but I wasn't sure. And since I never use DS myself, I wouldn't know :)

It does make sharing morphs a LOT easier though. So this is really great news!

Quote - Simple method for making PMDINJection's:

1st: Use Morph Manager to remove all original morphs from character and save a morphless CR2 for working with. 2nd. Load all your OBJ Morphs onto the new blank character in Poser. 3rd: Turn on "Use External Binary Morphs" in Poser Preferences. 4th Save figure back to Library thus creating a PMD file with all your morphs in it. Lastly, create a PZ2 file with the following code to call and load your PMD morphs on any figure:

Quote -
{
version
{
number 4
}
injectPMDFileMorphs :runtime:!PMDFiles:JamesHead.pmd
}

Thanks!  I'll try that.  

"Quote - "
OK.. I don't know if this is of any help, but since I like doing morphs, I've assembled a little pack of 8 face-shaping morphs for M4. Some to make him look younger. The thumbnail shows all 8 loaded at full, of course you can combine them as you see fit. The morphs are:...""

I stumbled upon those before reading about it in this thread.  They helped, I think.  I'll post pics when I have a chance.

Thanks for creating those.

What M4 texture was used for the pics on the first page of this thread?

Jayden for M4 was the texture used in those images.

Another thing I tried:

I tried faceshop to make a younger M4 face from a photo of a young man who was the look I wanted for the character.  The one time it ran to completion the face was decent, but ended up not looking like the young man in the photo.  It looked more like a 35 year old version of him.  Since then it has crashed every time before completing.  The texture it made was black.