Introduction The following article isn't intended to be a tutorial as such but rather a focused ‘making of' during which I will attempt to explain a lot of my working practices and techniques. I'm going to illustrate this with Videos and images where appropriate. I've also included at the bottom of the article a link to the scene file, which includes a version of the scene with a frozen mesh and all the textures in JPG format at full resolution. I have no intention of discussing modeling or sculpting techniques, as there are already thousands of head modeling tutorials out there and I really don't think there is anything I can tell you that you wont find better demonstrated elsewhere. Instead I want to focus on the Texturing, Shading, Lighting, Rendering and grading of this image. Projection Mapping There are various ways to texture a face, a lot of people tend to use 3d paint programs such as Zbrush or Body Paint, some artists still prefer to paint straight onto the unwrapped UV layout, however I prefer to use a Projection mapping / texture-baking technique. The process involves camera projecting a reference photograph straight onto the mesh and then baking the result out to the UV map, this allows me to create a distortion free base from which I can produce my colour, spec and bump maps. Setting up projection scene Setting up the scene is a fairly simple process, for this project I used two cameras, one for the front and one for the side. When setting up the cameras I always try to use the longest lens possible, this helps to flatten out the features of the face and reduces texture distortion due to perspective See Images and video Below |
