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Male Head

This model was started in Maya as a lofted NURBS surface built from many curves. These curves originated from the inside of the mouth, around the lips, over the head and down to neck - imagine a bent cylinder. The sunken areas around the eyes as well as the ears were modeled as seperate NURBS surfaces. All surfaces were then converted to polygons, faces were deleted on the head to accomodate the ears and eye areas, and all was fused together as one. A conversion to sub-division surfaces, back to polygons, and then an export to ZBrush finished the deal. Shading was accomplished via the mental ray misss_fast_skin subsurgace scattering shader. See below for more details.


Development
Original lofting of the curves. The original curves are the isoparms (lines) that start at the mouth and end at the base of the neck. Original ear and eyelid area NURBS surfaces. In both there are 8 spans, so that only 4 quads need to be deleted for each in the next step... Converted to polygons, the original CVs are stored as polygon vertices (hence the distortion.) Holes are made, and the ears and eyelids are attached.
 
The distorted poly mesh is converted into a sub-div surface, where the vertices become essentially CVs again. This is then converted to a poly mesh so that it can be modified in ZBrush. Here we have the mesh after it has been refined in ZBrush to make the figure look much older and more detailed in general. This is the final model wireframe and model.
 
Eyes are vital for if I want this to be believable. These are also subsurface scattered, with a blinn shaded cornea and surface on top. The bump map was painted on in ZBrush using the handy BumpViewerMaterial. Many wrinkles, pores, moles and other details were added at this stage. This is the shader network used for the subsurface scattering skin. Not too different from general SSS use, except for the use of the mix8layers node to add in the blinn specularity.
 
The final picture, now with some stubbly hair! Click to see a larger version.

 

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bluphoenix