I went ahead and created several morph targets to help me find my final expression quickly later on. Since the eyebrows and eyelashes were modelled separately, I found it very frustrating to get them to move correctly with the skin. The only solution that worked well for me was to break them into small groups and attach to. (Fig.10 -11)
Fig.10
Fig.11
Texturing:
Texturing
UV mapping actually came before rigging. When I reached the point when I decided the modelling was done, I unwrapped the model before breaking the symmetry so that I only worked on half the model, and this way I could get pretty symmetrical mapping as well. I used Pelt to determine where the seams would go, and together, with a little bit of relaxing and hand pulling of a few UV points, the UV chunks were perfectly ready with only a few very minor stretches. After the initial mapping was good enough, I broke the symmetry and went on to arrange the UV pieces as efficiently as possible.
Since fine details on the face are more important, I decided to break the head from the body and give it much more UV space. (Fig.12 - 13)
Fig.12
Fig.13
After making sure I’d minimised the stretches, had as few seams as possible, and used up as much of the UV space as I could without having any overlaps, I decided it was time to start painting the textures. I started off by sampling many of the elements from the many reference pictures that I used for the modelling. I then sort of "flattened" the image, took out the contrast and minimised the highlights and shadows; this gave me a rough initial background for the textures. The next step was to paint the "shades" – where the skin is generally brighter, darker, redder, etc. At this point it was time for me to start working on the finer details. A method I used a lot for this was to create many different pattern layers for freckles, spots, veins and other skin abnormalities, add a black mask to delete it, and then slowly bring it back manually with a low opacity white brush strokes. To create bump and specular maps I simply desaturated all the colour map layers and changed their value and contrast accordingly. Only minor local painting was required afterwards. (Fig.14 - 17)
