Software Used:

Maya, ZBrush, BodyPaint and Photoshop

In this Making Of I will try to explain the way in which I created my “close-up portraits”. I am going to mainly focus on the texturing/shading part.

Basic Modeling:

I reused the geometry of an old nurbs body that I made years ago. I converted it to polygons in Maya and then deleted the faces that were not going to be visible. I took care to make sure that almost all the polys were four-sided for a better subdivision later. Then, in ZBrush, I adjusted the proportions – it’s easier to do this by using the Move and Standard brushes (Fig.01).

Fig.01

UV:

I created the UVs in Maya. This resolution was enough to create the UVs and making them later with more subdivisions would be more difficult. I decided to create two different UV shells/textures to get more texture resolution, one for the just the face and then other for the rest of the head. I tried to place the seams in a hidden part (Fig.02).

Fig.02

Texturing:

Once I had finished the UVs I started creating the texture. I used photographs from the Ballistic DVD “ESSENCE: The Face” as the source for the textures of the skin. This DVD comes with hi-res photos of a woman (Fig.03).

Fig.03

I created the texture by switching between Bodypaint and Photoshop. I made several projections of the photos on the geometry and then merged the all together in the final texture. Here’s a little more detail (Fig.04).

Fig.04

In Bodypaint, I started by first assigning a white 4096px texture to the geometry. Then I chose a photo to project on the geometry and rotated the 3D view in a similar way. Now it was on to projection painting. This created a projection layer.  Then “Freeze3Dview”. This created a snapshot of the current 3D view placed in the projection layer. (I chose 4096 pixel resolution, as  with that I didn’t lose resolution when it was re-projected). I saved this image as a PSD file. Then, in Photoshop, I modified the original photo to match the geometry in the areas. I made different layers to have more control in specific areas (Fig.05).

Fig.05

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Related Tutorials

If you liked reading this tutorial, you may also be interested in the following. "Steamliner Toy Car in Maya 2010" by Karina Moreno Torres This tutorial is intended to guide you through the workflow of creating a streamliner toy car. The difficult level is intermediate, meaning you need to have a basic understanding of the process involved in modeling and rendering with Autodesk Maya 2010. "Stylized Character Modeling in Maya 2010" by Adam Dewhirst This tutorial is designed for beginners, who are attempting to make their first “cartoony” or stylized characters. It was created in Maya 2010 in conjunction with the Animation Workshop school in Denmark. The tutorial is recorded in real time, with no 'skipping ahead' or double speed, so you can follow along as we go, and hopefully by then end of the series you should have the basic knowledge for creating your own character head in Maya.