  | Introduction Most of my works are technical experiments. I’m applying new techniqes, new ideas, solutions. Similar situation was with my self portrait, but in this case I was trying to do something technical with some art in it.
Idea come from old picture of my face, it was the best picture in my life. By some accident with my hdd, I’ve lost it, and only copy whitch I found was my avatar on cgtalk. So I try to reconstruct my old picture. To do that I used recent pictures of my face and later I changed geometry to make it similar to my self 6 years ago.
Of course I had to upgrade my face to look, let’s say, better :) |  | Modelling To model my face I’ve used old model, but I change topology to be more universal for future experiments. I spend lots of time to have my model accurate as much as possible. Then I’ve made UVs, to do that I’ve used standard maya UV editor. My goal was to do UVs optimized for the face, not to waste any space of the texture. That’s why I made its face to be as big as possible and back of the head didn’t use UVs space at all. I still have hairs there :) So texture is not needed :) Maybe in the future...   
|  | Lighting When modelling part was finished, I took avatar and placed it on the background, and I started adjusting camera lens and angle. I was suprised ‘cause my face didn’t change so much :) But I had different face expression so I was trying to adjust this detail. It was quite hard because my avatar has 150x150 pixels, and there was also strange light. To make everything more complicated picture was changed in photoshop: contrast, brightness and curves. Maybe something else but I don’t remember after such long tme. For my old picture I was using 2000 watt cinema lamp so there was ultra strong light on my face. I chose area light because my lamp was 19 inch fresnel lens and there was a big lighting surface, not a point light. For the shadows I chose soft raytrace shadows. After 2 nights of playng with angle and distance of light finally I found the right position :) It was close enough to proceed with textures. | |
