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. You will also find 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 modelling or sculpting techniques, as there are already thousands of head modelling tutorials out there – and I really don't think there is anything I can tell you that you won’t find better demonstrated elsewhere. Instead, I want to focus on the texturing, shading, lighting, rendering and grading of this image.

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 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 lenses possible; this helps to flatten out the features of the face and reduce texture distortion due to perspective (See Fig01 – 03) (Fig.02 – click to download movie).

In Fig.01 you can see the camera layout and settings. Click on Fig.02 for the Flash video detailing the processes involved in setting up the scene.

Now I want to show you a technique which I use to match features on a photograph to the features on a mesh, without resorting to using the clone tool. For this particular project I modelled the face using the photographic reference as a guide, therefore the features are approximately in the same position as those on the texture reference. However, they are not exactly right, so I used the Liquify tool in Photoshop to gently “nudge” the features on the photograph around until they aligned to those on the mesh. Take a look at the video below to see how this works (Fig.04 – 05) (Fig.05 – click to download movie).

The next step in the process is to re-project the adjusted reference material back onto the mesh and bake it into two UV maps – front and side – which can later be combined to create a base for the colour map. In order to re-project the textures I used exactly the same scene and cameras as I did to render out the front and side views. The video (click on Fig.08) shows the how the process works.

See Fig.06 for the surface settings for front projection.

I set the surface of the mesh to that shown in Fig.06 using the front facing camera to project the front image. The next step was to use Microwave to bake the front projection into a UV map. Using the settings shown in Fig.07, I made sure to check the “Bake Colour” tab and set the Expand to 3 pixels – not including a 3-pixel border could have resulted in visible seams around the edges of the UV maps. Also something that I've noticed with Microwave: if you don't set the resolution of the scene camera to something equal to or higher than that of the texture you’re baking out, then it will blur the baked image. Once Microwave had done its thing and I’d saved out the baked front image, I then switched to the side camera, applied the side projection image to the surface, and ran through the whole process again – not forgetting to change the projection camera to 'side' in the surface settings.

See Fig.07 for the Microwave settings.