


Because I had to paint the face colour manually I lost alot of the miner details in the skin. There needed to be more imperfections and subtle details around the cheeks and neck. In Photoshop I chose the colour picker and clicked on a dark spot on the skin, then I chose a nice big messy brush and began to build up some colour around the areas that were needed. I did this on a new layer so I could lower the opacity level so the new effects were quite dim and natural looking.
Once I was happy with the the texture I imported it into Max to see what it would look like on my model. It didn't look to bad but it needed a fine bumpy texture for the skin cells.
I decided to add the eyes to the model next. To do this I created a sphere and then added a UVW mapping modifier then an eye map through the material editor. The problem I had was that the shape of the eyes and eye lids from my model were not quite right, so the round eye balls didn't fit into them properly. As I couldn't go back into the stack and modify the eyes I was stuck with this problem. From certain angles there was big gaps in the corners of the eyes, but from the front it didn't look too bad.
Then i needed to start building up the texture by taking bits and pieces from my photo reference. I had to also make sure the photo image is a higher resolution than the new image. In the reference photo I used the Lasso tool to cut parts of the photo and them to the texture.
As I only had a reference picture for one side of the head, so I had to copy and horizontally flip the image so it could be used on the other side of the face.
Once the main parts of the face were pasted on I then had to fill in all the missing gaps by using the 'Patch' and 'Clone' tools. Here I ran into a massive problem! When the photos were originally taken the camera must of produced two different shaded pictures. In the front picture I looked quite pale, but in the side picture I looked orange/brown. This may of had something to do with the flash or the lighting in the room. Because of this when I started to use the tools to copy colour the face started to look very patchy and odd.
In the end I had to use the colour I thought was the most realistic and paint most of the face with it so the colour looked constant and uniformed and not patchy and blotchy. I know now I would need to use some brushes give the skin a better effect.
Next I went into the material editor and chose a checkered pattern and added it to the selected object. Once this was done I clicked 'Edit' in the modifier parameters. This brought up the 'Edit UVWs' window, which had the face models geometry flattened out.
Here I needed to try and shuffle the vertices's about a bit so the checkered pattern on the head didn't have any stretched parts. This was done by using a tool called 'Relax'. I found that this tool was a bit hit or miss with my model so I resorted in moving some verts manually. The main areas of concern was the top of the head, nose, lips and eye. For the eye I found that using the Relax tool with 'Relax by centers' worked the best.
For the ear I also used an 'Unwrap UVW' modifier but this time I used the Planer wrap. Next I clicked on 'Pelt', which brought up the Edit UVWs window plus the pelt map window. What I needed to do next was to scale up the red guides and then rotate them so they twisted round the model. This would hopefully make the ear map flow nicely around the ear.
The lips were practically the exact shape to my own but I would need to see them with skin on to get a better idea if they were the right size.
The eyelids were made in the same way, but I didn't try to much with them because I hadn't created the eyeball yet and I was unsure on how much of the eye lid to have protruding. This is something I will correct later.
Overall I was quite pleased with the nose because it was proving to be quite difficult to get the lines right, and I never thought I was going to get there. If I knew the problems I was going to encounter, I would of changed my original topology design drawings. The nose wasn't one hundred percent perfect but I will probably try and shape it better later.
I then needed to create another plane but with the side view of my face. I did this by coping the first plane and rotating it around to the correct position. The view ports were then set up to show the just the left and front views, as these were the only ones I would be using.
Now I needed to start the modeling process. I started with the Line tool to connect all of the quads of the Topology by making building up small quad shapes that would cover my whole face and make a mesh to work with. I used the snap tool with vertex checked to make this process simpler to complete.
Once the whole face was complete I selected one line shape and converted it to an editable poly. Here I used the attach tool to connect all the splines together to make one line object. I also used the Weld tool to reduce the amount of vertices's that were used in the model. This would over half the amount of verts thus making it less likely to make a mistake later on.
I now had to start to build up the edges on my face. I choose a blue coloured brush and started to define the face by drawing over lines, wrinkles or protrusions. Here I was isolating all the key areas. The last part was to draw in to inner Topology. This was done be using a smaller red coloured brush to join all the blue Topology lines up. This made lots of small quads that would build up the contours of the face. The use of quads was important because triangles would cause a pinching effect when the modeling begun. I found this quite difficult to totally eliminate every three sided shape but I tyred to minimise them and try not have any in key areas.