Creating Faces/Makeups for skins

Hi,

I've just started to learn zbrush so that i can design my own skins.
my question is, does anyone have any guidance, pointers, tips for creating the faces. this is the most confusing part to me....the makeup. Also what is the best way to get reference photos... are they from magazines, stock archieves or drawn by hand.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

thank you
Imo

I'm not a skinner, but I've read that people who do make skins use many different sources, and each has its adherent. I've seen photorealistic skins, hand drawn skins, and combinations of the two.

I usually take a picture of myself and then import it to photoshop as a source

I have a few resources on my web site (www.secondskinlabs.com) that may help (male and female Ztools, and a basic makeup kit in the "downloads" section). I also have examples under the "services" section that show the typical face angles and lighting that I use for skinning the head of an avatar.

If you're using ZBrush for photosorced skins, and don't already have the Zscripts (Image Plane, and Texture Library) by Marcus Civis, you will find those extremely useful. The faster less buggy versions of these Zscripts run under Z2 rather than Z3, but Marcus is working on improving the latest versions (downloadable at Zbrush Central).

You will also find www.3d.sk to be the best commercial source for 3D photo reference. You need to subscribe to it for a nominal fee. A LOT of people already use this service, since it's practically the only one in town, so be prepared to see most of these references already used on a lot of skins floating around SL. If you want your skin to be unique, a good way to accomplish that is to use several model reference combinations and heavy editing in Photoshop to build a unique set of textures.

thanks to Wei and Oryx

thanks to Nam...get points and references