Digital Caricatures

[BriC]

Merry Christmas all!
I have had hit-or-miss success in using the liquify filter in order to morph photos of people into caricatures of that person. Depending on the image (or luck) haha - I have been happy with the outcomes of a few.
Does anyone have any information that they could share for creating nice, recognizable digital caricatures? - Or maybe a tip that just puts the cherry on the cake as far as realism?
Thanks for sharing your ideas!
-Brian

[edgework]

Partly it's a function of illustrative talent, of which I have little, so I'll say no more in that direction.

As far as the liquify tool goes, I use it all the time for body and face sculpting. Generally I'll use a large brush with low (20-30) brush pressure and density. Pressure determines the strength of the move, how far the pixels will be pulled, and density determines how far from the center the pixels will be affected. By varying the size of the brush, and those two parameters, you can pretty much control the shape of whatever artifacts you're modifying. For instance, if you wanted to pull ears out to elven pointiness, you might start with a brush that is slightly larger than the ear lobe to be stretched, use a high pressure to allow a long pull, but a low density to keep surrounding areas from being affected.

[raniday]

Brian, here's a thread on creating caricatures I started in another forum that you might enjoy:
http://www.innographx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2932