Materials

The materials part of any 3D model I always find the most rewarding. It can totally bring a 3D model to life and that is what I was looking to do to my model. I would be using the unwrap UVW modifier for the model. Firstly I separated the head from the ear and applied a checkerboard pattern to the model so that I could see what effects the Unwrap UVW modifier would have on the head. I then used the relax tool to edit the vertices in the uvw map. I used the pelt tool to get the same result with the ear. I had various overlapping faces that were rectified by moving the vertices so they were no longer overlapping. Sometimes 3DS Max would identify a supposed overlapping face even though it appeared it wasnt. Normally slightly moving connecting vertices fixed this.

This was a relatively painless process other than when I couldn't fully separate the second ear. For an unknown reason a group of polygons were welded together from both the ears. To overcome this I had to 'break' the vertices up and re-weld them together. Once my UVW map was finished I could then start working on the material creation using the reference photos.

This was the part I was most looking forward to, bringing my face to life so to speak. I used a variety of tool in photoshop including healing, spot healing, patch and clone to merge my segments of face together. I then subsequently created a bump map and specular highlights map from the different type of uvw map render.

I found the bump map way too harsh initially. So I went back into photoshop and blurred using the blur tool the soft skin areas such as the cheeks much more and sharpened the mouth, nose and eyes more with the sharpen tool. I went back and forth trying to get the balance just right.

I then created the specular highlight map to give the model its natural skin highlights concentrating on the oily parts of the skin.

Enough versions? I have finally got into the habit of saving multiple versions of my work to be able to go back to any point!