Fig.09
I
went ahead and created several morph targets to help me find my final
expression quickly later on. Since the eyebrows and eyelashes were
modelled separately, I found it very frustrating to get them to move
correctly with the skin. The only solution that worked well for me
was to break them into small groups and attach to. (Fig.10 -11) |
Texturing
UV mapping actually came
before rigging. When I reached the point when I decided the modelling
was done, I unwrapped the model before breaking the symmetry so that I
only worked on half the model, and this way I could get pretty
symmetrical mapping as well. I used Pelt to determine where the seams
would go, and together, with a little bit of relaxing and hand pulling
of a few UV points, the UV chunks were perfectly ready with only a few
very minor stretches. After the initial mapping was good enough, I
broke the symmetry and went on to arrange the UV pieces as efficiently
as possible.
Since fine details on the
face are more important, I decided to break the head from the body and
give it much more UV space. (Fig.12 - 13)
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After
making sure I’d minimised the stretches, had as few seams as possible,
and used up as much of the UV space as I could without having any
overlaps, I decided it was time to start painting the textures. I
started off by sampling many of the elements from the many reference
pictures that I used for the modelling. I then sort of "flattened" the
image, took out the contrast and minimised the highlights and shadows;
this gave me a rough initial background for the textures. The next
step was to paint the "shades" – where the skin is generally brighter,
darker, redder, etc. At this point it was time for me to start
working on the finer details. A method I used a lot for this was to
create many different pattern layers for freckles, spots, veins and
other skin abnormalities, add a black mask to delete it, and then
slowly bring it back manually with a low opacity white brush strokes.
To create bump and specular maps I simply desaturated all the colour
map layers and changed their value and contrast accordingly. Only
minor local painting was required afterwards. (Fig.14 - 17) |
When I started working on the hair I
approached it as I always do. The first step was to clone the polygons
that would “grow” hairs from the head, to a new unrenderable mesh. I
then added hairs and started combing and testing many different
possibilities. Here are a few pointers for when working with Max's
hair:
Variation – This is the key to making your
hair look interesting. Always try to test out how much you can push
parameters that will create variations in your hair, such as rand
scale, hue/value variation, frizz tip, randomise etc.
Passes – It is often recommended
to test how your hair looks when more than one pass is used. The
higher the parameter, the softer the hair will render!
Multi-strand Parameters – Hair often tends
to clamp up and this feature simulates it nicely. I usually turn it
on with root slay having a larger parameter than tip slay.
Lights and Shadows – This will make all the
difference about how your hair is going to render. Usually, using
spotlights with shadow maps are ideal for hair. An important decision
that always needs to be made when working with hair is, if you want to
render the hair at buffer or MR prim mode, buffer usually renders
faster and looks softer, but MR prim works well with many different
light and shadow types. (Fig.18 -30)
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At
a certain point I was struck with frustration when I realized that
this method is good but it doesn't allow me full freedom and control
to design the hair specifically as I want. That's when I came to realize
I can work with many smaller groups of hairs instead and control them
by splines. I started up by creating 1 spline which acts like the
profile of the hair's shape and cloned it twice to 3 different
elements that will control the hair. I've added hairs and pretty much
used similar parameters as before. Shaping the hair to specific shapes
was easy this way. I've clone the hair pieces many times to smaller
and larger parts and re-adjusted every piece until I was happy with
how it turned out.
For extra touches, I added a few more groups for random single hairs to give it a little more of a "natural messy" feel. |
Rendering and Compositing:
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The image
was basically done with the hit of the render button but rendering
many different passes allowed me some more fine tuning which was
necessary mostly for high res details. I’ve rendered many different
passes and used masks in photoshop to determine where and how much each
pass is used. A few pointers about some of them –
Specular -
I've rendered this pass by turning off all the color maps and setting
the diffuse to black (yep, using the built in pass rendering doesn't
seam to like working with the SSS materials) I used this pass to
control the level of highlights at different parts of the image.
(Fig.31 -32) |
Falloff
- Rendered the same way, only specular was turned off and I threw a
falloff map in the reflection slot. This pass served to fake the
"peach fuzz" effect at certain edges. When used correctly, it slightly
gives an "oily" feeling to the skin.(Fig.33)
Hair -
I've rendered out each and every piece of hair separately so that
I'll have very good control over the colors of the hair in
Photoshop.(Fig.34) |
Occlusion pass - this pass helped a bit to add more depth to the geometry. I wrote a tutorial on how I use it. (Fig.35) |
Hair occlusion - Same
as above. In order for the hair to render out correctly in the
occlusion pass, you need to select your hair, under the "MR
parameters" turn on "apply mr shader" and place your occlusion material
there (you need to be in MR prim mode). (Fig.36) |
Peach fuzz
- This pass was rendered out for extra skin details that mainly show
in the full resolution. I used a mask to make it show up only in areas
it usually shows up like on the the lip or the chin. (Fig.37 & 38) |
That's it, after combining all the passes
together; I went through some color correcting and some local fine
tuning and this is the result (50% resolution). I hope this was
informative and interesting for you. (Fig.39) |
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