After my break

I have now added a lot more detail to the face to make it look more realistic.

I have added a bump map to simulate pours in the skin. For this I copied the colour map and desaturated it to make it black and white. I then added some extra detail and applied the finished product as a bump map.

Next I have added a specular map to define where the highlights are and how strong they are. These are points on the face that catch the light more than other areas as they tend to get more oily than others.

I am just working on adding some hair now and changing the lighting to make it more realistic before adding some animation.

I couldn't resist

Just had to be done realy, its all photoshop practice, honest.

How is it going?

Well! How indeed. I have modelled the head and done the face mapping but I am in now way convinced that this looks like me.

Once I had got the head and that awful ear finished I began the mapping process. First I had to apply a checker pattern to the head to identify where any stretched pixels where. I used the unwrap UVW modifier to correct any problems found here. Once I had cleaned those issues and stretched out the UVW map I then moved over to Photoshop. In here I began cutting out the main features of my face, eyebrow, lips, nose etc… Next using a combination of the clone stamp and patch tool I filled in all the gaps between the features.

I still have a couple of tutorials to follow to add more detainl to the face but im certainly getting there.

I reckon I haven’t got some of the featured of my face defined correctly on my face mesh and that is why it is not looking correct just yet, maybe with some tweaking all will be well.

I think I am going to take a couple of days off from it as I have been at it for 14 hours a day for a week. I think a break may help me to see the bigger picture on my return to the project.

Eye see you

Rather than move on to the next tutorial I decided to brush up on my photoshop skills, I decided to create an eye for my ‘bust’

I began with the iris colour and the pupil (1) and used the liquify tool to smudge the edge of the pupil (2). Next I added another circle and added some noise to it (3) before using the zoom blur on it (4). I then, after changing the blend mode to make it look right (5) used the liquify tool again to mess up some of the straight lines created (6). Next I duplicated the iris and changed its colour and added some more detail to it (7) before placing it behind the iris and lowering the fill. The next steps (8)(9) involve duplicating the previous layer and changing them to 2 different shades of brown, rotating them and adjusting their size and fill level. To soften up the look of the eye I added a small amount of gausian blur to the iris (10) so it didn’t have such a harsh edge. Nearly there I added a black ring around the edge (11) to break up the eye a bit. Next, the veins (12) pretty self explanatory and finaly I added a light red circular haze around the eye to take the edge off the white (13).

In the last image you can see where I realised that I had not created enough white space around the eye for it to be used as a map. I figured rather than try, and ultimately fail, to extend all the veins out over more space the best option would be to reduce the size of the pupil and iris.

Evidence

I have just noticed that in the photo below the offender can not be easily identified so here is a closer look.

An offence has been committed

I am preparing to move on to the mapping phase so thought this would be a good time to make sure I was happy with the mesh as any changes made later would mean lots of changes to mesh and map alike.

This was the scene of the crime, a small pinching like under my chin, it looked like a spot. I had a look over the problem and the mesh appeared to be in a funny shape around the area and I could not figure out why, when I moved the vertices near the area they were not helping to solve the problem. Then I decided to move the vertices near the offender and it turned out one of them was not connected to its partner. The offending vertex was immediately arrested and tried in a court of Max where it was found guilty being a rouge vertex and sentenced to a severe target welding, it is now living in a happy symbiotic relationship with its neighbour. In a statement to the local vertices chief inspector coos said “some times these offenders quietly integrate in to our society and live out normal live but the will cause us trouble at some point. If we are constantly on the look out perpetrators will be discovered and rehabilitated and we can all live as one smooth mesh”.

In retrospect, I believe it is important to always be mindful of problems but it is easy to get lost in the task at hand. This problem has lay hidden away for 2 solid days and it is only as I decided to give the mesh a full medical before moving on that the problem was spotted. I think a complete review of each stage upon its completion, before moving on, is vitally important to ensure you don’t run in to serious trouble further down the road.

It's life Jim, but not as we want it!

What do you make of it????? I have shoulders, a neck, ears, nostrils, cheek bones, lips and a whole load of other stuff but I am not convinced this is going to turn out looking like me!

Anyway. Since last time I have progressed a lot through some serious hours at the pc. lets begin with the nose eyes and lips. The tutorials we were following were quite informative, we had to learn how to use new selection methods to select edges and produce new ones, and then weld everything together. The process was relatively simple although time consuming, you spend a lot of time tweaking various elements.

The neck. The guy in the tutorial cheated! He picked a guy that has no neck. You would assume after defining complex facial features you would find it easy to create a round head and neck, WRONG. It is surprisingly difficult as there are several points where the flow of the geometry has to change direction, for instance at the back of the head and where the neck meets the shoulders and so on. I had attempted this three times and was getting nowhere as the geometry from the sphere was flowing in the wrong direction. It wasn't until in class today when Paul (fellow student) pointed out that I had to create a different shape to change the geometry from going round in circles to going straight down. After this realisation the rest of the head went pretty smoothly. Its always the simple things.

Then came the ears, well, what the hell? Who invented ears? I'll tell you who, some snotty jobsworth that knew one day I would have to recreate them in 3D and he thought "how can I make this difficult for him?" Well he succeeded. The ears are by far the hardest thing I have done on this project, no, Ever done in 3D max. The geometry is complex but the hardest part is connecting it to the head. It is really hard to see what you are doing and you have to turn around a lot of segments so they don’t pinch and stretch when you connect them. On the eats I have managed to get the curl under (on the back outer rim of your ear) but adding edges, moving them closer to the face then pulling them past the lines they are connected to.