A Complete Head - Shame there's no brain

Having made the mesh, moulded it into 3d, given it materials and detailed information on light and texture, my head is now complete.




There are a couple of things wrong with it;

- The nose I think could be improved to look more like my own, however adjusting that at this stage would throw off the whole texture map and therefore I would have to do pretty much all the texturing again (at least every step).
- Hair could be added along with eyelashes using the Hair and Fur Modifier to give a more realistic look to the hair, make it spikey like the initial photographs that were used as guides. I did not choose to do this because through experience I have had extreme difficulty with this tool and with the time remaining before hand in I am not prepared to worry myself over this detail. The hair looks realistic enough.
- The ear piercing is not 3 dimensional; the piercing should protrude from the ear, and if you're picky the butterfly should be created behind the ear. But this detail is not needed.
- The back the the entity does not look quite right in terms of colour matching, however due to the target areas being on opposite sides of the photoshop file I fail to see how these could be matched up easily.



Overall though I am very pleased with my head, it has turned out well and on the whole, does look like me! (At least me when I don't spike up my hair!!!

Specular Map

I have created a specular map for the mesh to make a more realistic light distribution.



The first time I imported this into MAX there was a problem; the fringe had some extra light, perhaps where I had not gotten rid of the embossing effect or the more likely I think, that when changing the Levels in the adjustments menu, the level of white is too high in this area. So putting this into MAX, this is what happened:



There is a horrible shine around the fringe, ghastly white areas that looks awful. Also, all over the skin there is a "freckly" effect where the levels weren't dark enough. However when trying to modify this, levels for other areas of the image were unusable.

My first attempt to fix things only made this worse. Trying to adjust the levels or paint over the area just resulted in the following (below, left).



To fix the problem I had I simply turned off the layer creating the problems and created a solid black layer to sit behind the drawn in highlighted areas (above, right).

Then to recreate the irregularity of the skin and it's composition I distorted the layer with a the texturizer modifier (sandstone) to give it more detail.



And there you go, hey presto, you have a bumpy, light-controlled, realistic looking head! The way the skin reacts to the light is relative to the oiliness of the skin and now looks realistic in that sense.



And that completes my head!

Texture Mapping; Bump Map

I have now created a bump map to give the skin on my head more depth and make it look more realistic. There were quite a few areas of the perimeter that were embossed and needed to be mixed in.



The first render was too fine, and I did need to add the MIX with NOISE to make the skin more realistic and irregular in terms of pattern.



All that I can say is I played with the settings, adjusting values, sliders and mix values until I was happy with the result. I decided on this (below).

Texture Mapping Continued; Normals

Firstly, here is my complete texture map, (notice I have gone to the detail of removing the ear piercing from the side I don't have!).


Using a normals render without visible edges the depth of features on the face could be determined.


Please notice the left side of the upper lip. I noticed that my map did not match up with my mesh in some areas, (especially the lips e.g. not tall enough). I followed the tutorial and marked up the texture map file, but found that editing the texture map at this point to be unsuccessful and looking unrealistic! The colours were not right and too constant throughout the whole lip. Having noticed this after mixing the layers and patching, the only option after seeing that copying in patches again was ineffective was to "draw" it in using the clone tool. The problem was, I think, that the source for the clone is too small to give a useful sample.

This was ineffective and so I decided to leave this factor and move on through the tutorials.

Completing the Texture Map

Here are the final stages of the completion of the texture map in terms of initial map creation.



Filling up the last few areas was a pain, the ears especially were hard. Where my hair was overlapping my ears in the source photographs, this has been carried forward to the material map and as you can see by the right image above it does not look very realistic. Therefore this was removed and using initiative other skin coloured areas were used to "recreate" the ear.



Using Hue / Saturation it was fairly easy to match colours up; simply sliding the values for both allowed for visual comparison between the layer in question and the surrounding layers. (This was done before the merging of layers, and for each layer the modification was merged down with that layer so it did not affect any others (found this out the hard way!).



The nostrils were easier than I had first thought with the simple filling up the hole with a skin tone colour using the clone tool. Using the patch tool got rid of all the lines and colour differences between the different portions of skin. THIS TOOL IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. I actually love this tool, it was so helpful and once I figured out how to use it effectively, it was unreal how quick and useful it could be.

Material Continuation

Patch after patch I have created the majority of the material now. The hair has been particularly unusual, I thought the flat image would look unrealistic but it doesn't look too bad. It just looks like I didn't put wax in my hair that day...



I did realise that there are no eyeballs, this has just been put to the side. But now things are starting to look realistic, I decided to add this feature. Simply creating a sphere and applying a planar UVW Map modifier to reflect the planar layout of the source image, (flat from a front view), I placed this inside the entity and applied a smaller version of the original source image of myself (just the individual eye) and cloned this for the other eye, changing the material to the other eye, again for accuracy.



Foolishly, I did not save before the next step, so I did end up doing it again, but I attempted to attach the two spheres to the mesh. (Not weld, just attach, so they were a group). This resulted in the following:



My texture was all but thrown out the window. From experience last year, I know you can spend absolutely hours fiddling with materials in MAX, and I really did not fancy that! It was easier to simply recreate the spheres and apply the ready-to-use materials.

Giving a touch of realism...

Progressing on with this organic modelling, I have now used Photoshop to create a texture map of the desired material (my face) to be attached to the mesh to create a realistic looking digital version of me.

After rendering the required guide, Photoshop was used to create the material for the mesh.



This was a good guide, especially now there were no overlapping or inverted faces. The only problem I had was when areas like the lips had so many edges bunched together, it was hard to distinguish where the certain features were meant to be placed.



I found it a lot easier to go ahead and apply the texture in a PSD format with collapsed layers to the mesh and keep 3ds max open and showing the 3d representation of what was going on as I adjusted the Photoshop file. It made it easier to see it visually, rather than try to imagine it.



Adding patches of the source photos was a timely procedure but gave effective results. The warp tool was especially helpful for moulding the patches into place within the mesh.



More and more patches were applied and progress was consistently reviewed in MAX.

Lips, Eyes & Redoing the UVW Mapping

I have had to redo the UVW Map stage completely, as I forgot a part of the topology!

Having not adjusted the eyes and created lips at all, I had to jump back down to the editable poly stage, which mucked up the textures.

Holding shift and dragging edges allowed lips to be made, and I also adjusted the eyes to be able to support eyeballs. It now looks more realistic, (from close-range).

Doing the UVW Unwrap a second time, I found that things went a lot more smoothly. Once again creating a cylindrical plane for the head, relaxing the faces of the head seperately from the ear gave more flexibility in the use of UVW editing.



The second time round, for no apparent reason the pelt modifier seemed to work properly and properly commit after closing the modifier, as shown below. I also fixed ALL inverted and overlapping faces, much to my surprise.



It was more difficult to weld the two halves together this time though, the vertices were farther apart and had more of an arc in shape. This was no real problem, just time consuming.



So after a foolish mistake, and a bit more time spent, I now have a mesh with lips and suitable eyes with correct material layouts. Yey!

Materials (UVW Mapping)

I struggled greatly with materials last year and was extremely apprehensive with this stage of the head creation. This method though was much better and more detailed, and (eventually) sucessful.

To begin, selecting the faces of the head in an UNWRAP UVW modifier and relaxing this produced nice results. I will be honest, when doing this section, I did run into problems of having inverted faces and overlapping faces that I did ignore, but this was fixed later on. The ear was of a different scale, and so looked different.



Identifying a seam allowed the ear to be mapped with the PELT modifier. Again, naughtily I ignored the fact that the pelt did not work, because as you can see in the screens below it looks as if it is from the side view rather than being unwrapped.



I continued with the tutorial and welded the mirrored maps together, all ready for the next step.

Attaching The Ears

Now for another problem; when unhiding my head, the ears are positioned inside the head. This is because when creating the head, there was a lot of guess work involved because of the volume of my hair. To solve this, I simply moved the vertices surrounding the ear inwards to create a small cavity for the ear.



Once in place, to attach the ear, firstly a back had to be created to make the ear 3 dimensional. Holding shift and dragging edges inwards allowed a quick and easy back to be produced, and after matching up the number of edges for ataching the two entities together (easier than I thought!)



Once happy with the cavity around the ear, the back of the ear and the edges, I simply created polygons to attach the two entities to make them one.



Now when I did this the first time, as shown below somewhere along the line the symmetry modifier was lost. This resulted in the opposite ear not being created.

Rather than have to do all the work again (UNDO was not available to that point) I tried to look at the entity and see what was wrong.




It seemed there were miscellaneous vertices in the environment that were not part of the actual entity (messy work on my part). These were found and removed at a later stage, but I could not identify them for some reason at this point. Nevertheless, I tried to apply the symmetry modifier after attaching the ear, which theoretically would produce the desired results. (Image on left).



After revealing that it would not, I went back to a file before the ear attachment and reattached it in the same fashion keeping an eye on the symmetry modifier (right image). This shows the final head after this was successful.