Apart from this, I created extra geometries to create the tear line and to improve the blending between the eyeball and the face. I also adjusted the eyelid to the shape of the eye for the different poses (Fig.25).

Fig.25

Teeth:

Once I’d modeled the teeth I used photos to create the textures. For the shader, I made several tests to simulate a good translucency. Finally I used the SSS fast skin shader with this configuration (Fig.26).

Fig.26

The reflection is in an extra pass. I made it with a blinn shader to compose later in Photoshop.

Hair:

For the hair there were two stages: the generation and the shading.

Hair Generation:

I made many tests to create the haircut that I wanted, and it was so painful. The best that I found was shave and haircut, using nurbs curves to create the hair (something like a loft, but with hairs). With this method I could control the style of the hairs. For that, I selected two or more curves, created the hair and selected “Interpolate Guides”. I created different hair systems for each style to give some variety. If you only create one, the result is very “smooth” (Fig.27).

Fig.27

I created two different hairstyles and also a bald version (with the hairs from the skin texture. So I then had three different hairstyles to choose for each pose. In this image you can see the different systems used for each style (Fig.28).

Fig.28

Once the systems were created, I ran a dynamic simulation to lay down the hairs in the final position.  I used a version of the geometry with smoothed ears to avoid problems with the dynamic simulation.

Hair Shading:

For the shader, I used “shaders_p” hair system. I played with different shaders and this was the one that gave me best results. It can be downloaded here: http://www.puppet.tfdv.com/download/shaders_p_e.shtml To use that shader instead of the shave and haircut one, you have to uncheck “OverrideGeomShader”. Then you can apply the shader that you want to the hair system. I made different shaders with little variation in the position of the specular and assigned these to the different hair systems. I then rendered the hairs in a different pass ready to be composited later in Photoshop.

Fur:

I wanted to add fur to the face because the camera is so close to the face and I think this adds a lot of realism. I created different systems, each one with a different width, length and orientation. I used the Paint Fur Attributed tool to paint the baldness of each system. I rendered in a separate layer, and composed in Photoshop with the blending mode set to Screen (Fig.29).

Fig.29

Composition:

I merged all the layers that I had previously rendered. Nothing special here; I just configured all the layers and passes in Photoshop. Finally I added a layer of noise, a bit of blur and some chromatic aberration to try and reduce the CG appearance (Fig.30).

Fig.30

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