Making of 'Klara Medkova'

Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Fábio M. Silva and I'm a CG artist from Portugal.  Today I am going to give you some insight into how I created my CG model of Klara Medkova, which is to date probably the most famous of my works in the CG community.

Concept

Some friends of mine who are enthusiasts of my CGI works, who had seen some pretty awesome CG realistic humans from other artists, told me that I should try and make the most realistic human possible as I could.  Although I really like stylised yet complex characters, such as characters from Final Fantasy games and Blizzard Entertainment cinematic characters, I also like seeing more realistic characters.  So I gladly took up the challenge of making this model for my upcoming demo reel.

After searching for a while, I decided to create a CG model of Klara Medkova, a Czech supermodel (Fig.01).  Not only is she really cute, but there are also some really good references of her on the internet.

Fig. 01

Modelling

I found that my model library that I've been building up over the years, specially the generic female models I have made, needed a revision, so I decided to build Medkova from scratch (Fig.02).  It was challenging for me because I hadn't modelled a female face from scratch for quite some time.  It takes a lot of time and patience to get things right.  The secret behind feminine faces, in my opinion, is moderation and balance.  Her face isn't symmetrical, but it's good to just look at one side of the reference and try to make proportions good for the other side as well (since usually the modelling on one side doesn't match the reference on the other, as faces are not symmetrical).  At the end I usually add a morph modifier or edit polygons on top and create some asymmetry to break things up a little and to make stuff more interesting to look at in the final render.

Fig. 02

Since the ears are one of the most complex regions of the human body, I decided to model them separately (Fig.03).  It doesn't match Medkova's one 100%, but I think it came close enough for what I needed.  I also tend to have to make compromises between 100% resemblance and good topology, which isn't always the easiest of choices.  Not forgetting that I needed to make this head generic in a way that would allow me to use her again in the future as my new generic female (which may prove to be difficult since Klara has some very unique facial features).

Fig. 03

As you can see from Fig.04, I hadn't totally finished the head when I started to think about how to merge both the head and the ear together.  This was one of the most time consuming and hardest steps for me since all needed to fit together perfectly and make sense in terms of the topology (I always tend to make my models capable of animation, as if they are for a production environment, which meant Klara had to be able to have facial animation and deform properly, whilst not being too dense in places that do not require so much information, i.e. in the places of the human head that don't have so many muscles).

Fig. 04

The head was finally complete in terms of modelling at this stage (Fig.05) - 100% quads, with not even a single triangle or N-Gon!  It was hard to get to this stage, but I believe I did a good job, and it has been the most perfect head I've ever built so far in terms of the quality of the mesh.  At this stage, it just needed to be tweaked in terms of proportions to be as close as possible to my model, Klara Medkova.

Fig. 05

Texturing & Materials

A few years ago, I hadn't yet realised the true power of good texturing.  It is one of the major factors that make a model work or not, unless it's a clay render of something like a statue or the like, but since we're talking about realistic humans here, texturing (and clean UVs) is really important!

Since I wanted to make large final renders of her, I decided to go with big textures.  Each map for the head was 4K.  Her eye textures were smaller, but still fairly big.  I textured her, paying very close attention to the real Medkova face, getting spots in the same place and scars as well.

The materials were quite simple: I used a Fast-SSS for the head and eyes and a transparent raytrace material for the cornea, and I had to tune them all quite a bit before I got the results I wished for (Fig.06).

Fig. 06

Lighting

For the lighting I used Mental Ray's Daylight system (with HDRI), which was actually the first time I'd used it on an image of my own.

This is a trick I usually do to see where the shadows are falling off: just a grey shaded head rendered with the lights I want in my scene.  The shadows were soft on the right part of the image and strong and sharp on the left - I thought they may have been a little too harsh, but then I realised that this might look good for achieving more realism in the final image (Fig.07).

Fig. 07

Hair

I knew the hair would be difficult, but it was also one of the main reasons that I chose to make a realistic human.  Since I love to make hair, I wanted to push my hair modelling skills forwards and learn how to make better hair.  For this image, I used the Hair & Fur modifier to create it.

Before I actually made the hair on Medkova, I ran some tests on a different file using a ball full of hair.  I wanted her hair to be spiky on the tips, just like her hair is in real life.  After spending some time experimenting, I ended up with this hair with this colour (Fig.08).

Fig. 08

Her hair has several layers; each layer was carefully brushed and modelled to look like her real hair (the long version), and I created a different hairstyle from her own, yet still one that would look great on her if she had such a haircut (Fig.09)!

Fig. 09

Here is one of the earlier tests of hair on her head (Fig.10).  It was starting to look good, but it needed more hair still, so I cranked up the hair count for the final render!

Fig. 10

Compositing

The final step was to render both elements (hair and head) on different renders and bring them both together for one final image.  I rendered the hair and the hair's shadows in scanline, using a different lighting setup to what I had used for the model of the head, but which still resembled the sunlight system I had for Mental Ray (Fig.11).

Fig. 11

The hair colour wasn't so good so I had to give it some colour correction in Photoshop (Fig.12).

Fig. 12

And there it is: the final render (Fig.13)!  Putting the hair and head together was one of the most difficult parts for me, since the hair's shadows tended to be quite strong in some areas.  It took me sometime to manually erase some of them.

Fig. 13

For the final image, I wanted a somewhat of a 'cold stare' expression from her.  It's very subtle so it's not very direct.  I think really subtle things help in bringing the realism along!

I hope you have enjoyed this making of, and perhaps have taken some useful info from it.  Have a nice day and see you soon!