Female Portrait 009

OK, we are on the final stretch. This is my most recent render.

I still haven't tried new camera angles and there are still a few things I want to do with the hair but overall I think this is the final look I am going with.

I adjusted the lighting setup to be more like studio lighting. Here is my setup.

The next few things I plan on doing is adding a gradient to the hair so she can have dark roots like my reference. I also want to do some slight tweaking to some strands of hair. After that I will be doing some renders with different HDRI's (High Dynamic Range Images) and see what my result is. My end goal is to be able to render a full turnaround with different IBL's (Image Based Lighting). That might be a tall order considering I only have one machine to render with but I will do my best.

Anyway, please don't hesitate to comment and critique. Since I am nearing the final render I would really like to hear some feedback. You don't need an account to leave a comment, just select anonymous and it should go through.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Female Portrait 008

I did a final pass on the hair in Zbrush and this was my result.

Next I started exporting all the hair that I created. Since the eyelashes were geo, I used ZRemesh to reduce the amount of polys. I didn't want such a small thing to be so heavy in poly count. After that I went through each clump of hair and used fast preview to reduce the amount of hairs and exported the curves.

Once in Maya, I simply scaled and translated everything into position and started creating the hair. It was pretty simple to get a basic setup since I saved presets in Maya from my first attempt. This is a rough pass of what I have now.

Sorry for the low quality render but since it is a rough pass I didn't want to do a full render.

I still have a lot of work to do on the shaders but that just requires time. I will also be adjusting the lighting setup and messing with different camera angles.Getting very close to finishing now.

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post. 

Female Portrait 007

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the long wait, the hair took a lot longer than I thought it would. I have also been really busy these past few days only leaving me about an hour to work.
After using this new method of working on the hair, I don't know if the look is worth the total time it took to create it. I think the best way would be a combination of my old method and this new one. Since my old method is much faster, I would use that for a majority and just do a few spots of the new method. I will have to do some test later to compare time and quality.
Long hair is still very perplexing to me. It took me a while till I could actually figure out how the hair was working and what needed to happen in order for it to feel correct. I got the hair to a point and then decided to do a paint over to match the feel I wanted. Here was my first attempt.

And here was the paint over.

So I liked the feel I was getting, except the bottom half of the hair had way too much volume. Mostly due to the fact that I had all of the hair coming over the shoulder. Also, I still did not have the same hair style that I was trying to replicate.

So I tried pulling some of the hair off of her shoulder and putting it over her back. I ended up with this result which made sense realistically, but it wasn't the same as my reference.

After looking at the reference images I have, I finally noticed that the model has her hair cut short on her left side and it gradually lengthens as it moves to the right side.

Finally, I came up with this result.

I am pretty happy with the result, I just want to make a few corrections here and there. I still need to add stray strands of hair to add to the realism of the hair. I also need to adjust the eyebrows because they are too short right now. Overall though, I think it's pretty close to done.

Sorry for the long wait, hopefully I can get back to normal updates. Once again, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Female Portrait 006

Now that I had the look I was trying to achieve all I needed to do was finish the texturing and tweak the SSS material. 
I did most of the texturing in Mudbox and then transferred everything over to Photoshop to make the maps more manageable. I painted the freckles in Photoshop just because I have a brush that makes it easier as well as look nicer. I also painted a gloss map, a dry skin map, and a map for the makeup. After some tweaking this is what I settled on.

The one thing I am going to keep adjusting is the makeup. Other than that I think it looks fine. I could be wrong though, so please let me know what you think. 

And so that's pretty much where I am right now. I am currently working on all the hair and I hope to get it done soon. Since my blog is pretty much caught up to where I am, I won't be posting as often. From here on it will be little tweaks here and there, which isn't as exciting to see. I am hoping to post every other day but we will see how it goes. And remember, any comment is valuable. So please if you think something looks weird or you think the skin looks good let me know. I look at this so much that sometimes my view of it can be clouded. Remember I thought that first sculpt looked good at one point, boy was I wrong.

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Tumblr Blog

Just wanted to say that I created a tumblr Blog. This will still be my main blog and both blogs will have the same content. I created the tumblr blog in hopes of my work getting more attention and possibly being able to get more critiques on my work. 

The link should be to the right of the page titled, "My Tumblr Blog".

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Female Portrait 005

The skin pore detail is one of the subtle details that can really sell your work. In the beginning I was just using Zbrush's noise maker to get an overall pore detail. After watching Frank Tzeng's tutorial I learned that that was the old way of doing pores. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do the pores the same way he did since he advises buying some alphas (black and white images that you can use to create detail) and I didn't have the money for them. So I just made do with the ones that he provides.It could be better, but I don't think it looks too bad. 

One thing that I am still having trouble with is getting high detail on a mesh without subdividing it too much. For example on Frank Tzeng's sculpt he was able to get very fine detail but his mesh only had 3 million points. When I tried the same thing I got to 4 million points yet wasn't able to get the same amount of detail. If you have any advice on this I would love to hear it. Anyway, this is what my sculpt detail looks like.

Since I had now finished the sculpt I needed to brush up on creating a SSS (sub-surface scattering) material. The tutorial I watched was "Realistic Skin Shading, Lighting and Rendering in 3ds Max and V-Ray" by Adam Lewis on Digital Tutors (a website with lots of different tutorials to say the least). Now, I am using Maya not 3ds Max but it was still a great tutorial. One thing he stressed was that in order to have believable skin you need a good texture map. 

I am using Autodesk Mudbox to texture the mesh. I still haven't gotten completely used to texturing in Mudbox so it was kinda hard for me to create a good skin map. This was my first rough pass which was definitely not cutting it. 

I ended up finding another tutorial on Digital Tutors ("Painting a Realistic Skin Map" by Cory Cosper) that went over texturing in Zbrush. After I watched that I took one of the images I had and projected it onto the mesh. I was only able to use a small portion of the projection and just pulled colors from it to paint the rest of the mesh. This was the result.

That's it for today, thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one.

Female Portrait 004

I got a tutorial a while back by Frank Tzeng (an amazing artist you should check out if you are into 3D modeling) on Sculpting likeness but I never got around to watching it. So I figured now was a good time to watch it since I was in a rut.

The full tutorial is very long and is a total of about 20 hours but it was definitely worth the watch. I learned a few new things about Zbrush and learned a lot about subtlety in anatomy. I think my biggest take away was just seeing his process of working as well as making observations from reference. I highly recommend buying the tutorial if you are trying to get better at sculpting likeness in 3D. 

One of the first things I learned was that lots of reference is essential for doing a likeness sculpt. And so I went and got as much reference as I could and made a layout sheet.

So with new motivation I restarted my sculpt once more. I used my previous sculpt as a base and started matching proportions first. After that I started sculpting based off my knowledge of anatomy and referencing the layout sheet. Once I got it to a point a asked for some feedback again and made the corrections. The good thing is that the new way that I set everything up makes it a lot easier to make corrections to the sculpt. This was the result.

To keep this post short I will end it there. Next time I will briefly talk about how I did the skin pores as well as start talking about the texturing.

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Female Portrait 003

Starting the new sculpt, I decided to use Zbrush's spotlight tool. The spotlight tool allows you to reference an image onto your document (screen space) and you can use it to project a texture onto your model. I found that it is also good for referencing images. So, I used the images that I had gotten before and started tweaking the sculpt to match the proportions.
Once I moved everything into place I looked at the model and thought that it looked completely off. So I got it to a point and started sculpting again. Still referencing only the three or four images I had. Once I got it to where I thought it looked similar I again completed the process of moving it over to Maya. This was the result.

Once rendered I started doing small tweaks again. I noticed the nose was incorrect and needed to be fixed. So I ended up with this.

I thought it looked decent enough but I still wasn't getting the detail that I wanted for the skin bump. Originally I used both a normal map (a map that gives the mesh information in order to fake lighting of bumps and dents but does not displace the surface) and a displacement map (a map that displaces the surface for bump and dent detail). But the displacement wasn't giving me what I wanted (because I did it wrong) so I got rid of it and only used a normal map. Because the normal map was barely visible I bumped it up to a value of 2 instead of 1.

A friend had asked previously if I was using a 32 bit image for the displacement but I was using a 16 bit image because that is what Zbrush gave me by default. So I looked into creating a 32 bit image for displacement in Zbrush and found out how to do it. Once I applied it to my mesh I realized my mistake of bumping up the normal map. So I set it back to a value of one to correct it.

Normal Map (Value=2) + Displacement

Normal Map (Value=1) + Displacement

This is when I kinda hit a wall and decided that I wasn't really getting anywhere. The sculpt still wasn't very similar to the model and it just wasn't up to par with what I wanted. So I decided I need to study more and watch some tutorials.

Thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next one. 

Female Portrait 002

So I forgot to give a little back story on how I chose the person to base my reference off of, so I will give a short one. I came across a wallpaper and decided I wanted to do a portrait. This is the wallpaper.

That's how I ended up with that first sculpt. This is the only reference I used when creating the first one. Which now I know you need a lot more than one photo if you are trying to do a likeness sculpt. 

So when I started re-sculpting I just went for it. I found out who the model was and got two more images of her to use (I thought it was enough I guess, but clearly I was wrong). So I just started sculpting from looking at the images and trying to do it all by eye. After I finished the sculpture I created hair using fibermesh (Zbrush's hair system), that way I could later export the hair to be rendered in another software. Once that was done, I retopoed (created a structure for the 3D mesh made from points connected by edges to form the mesh) the mesh and imported it into Maya (another 3D software used for multiple things). I then used V-Ray (a rendering engine) to create the texture for the skin and the hair. This was the result.

At the time I thought it looked pretty decent. So I posted it on Facebook to get some feedback from friends. They all gave me amazing feedback and I immediately began making the corrections. When I started doing that I realized, that my sculpt didn't actually look anything like the model. Plus my proportions were completely wrong and my skin texture needed a lot of work. So I ended up having to go all the way back to the beginning and start over.

Ok, so that's it for this post but I just wanted to mention that if you have any questions feel free to ask. Whether it be that you don't understand something or you want a more in depth description of how I did something, I would be happy to tell you.

Once again thanks for reading and I hope you look forward to the next post.

Female Portrait 001

I started using Zbrush (a 3D sculpting software) a while ago. I think sometime back in 2012. I immediately fell in love with the software. So I sculpted a female portrait and posted images of it on Facebook in February of 2013.

 

Afterward I continued developing my skills and working on projects. After I graduated I did a small traditional sculpture self portrait and posted pictures of it on Facebook. That was when I came across the image of my old sculpture. I immediately thought, "Wow, that looks terrible compared to what I can do now." I also thought that it being there reflects badly on my skill level. So I decided that I would redo the sculpt and show just how much I have improved. I also thought it would be a good opportunity to add it to both my modeling and lighting demo reel.

And so I began a journey that I thought was just going to be really quick. Turns out I still had a lot to learn. 

I want you all to be able to see my process. So I will be starting from the very beginning and continually creating post where I talk about what I have done and what I was thinking at the time. Once I get caught up to where I actually am then the critiques will be really helpful. I will also try to keep these post short so you don't have to read an entire book every time I create a post. Not sure on the schedule I am going to keep for posting things, but I will try to keep one. Just drop by once and a while and hopefully it will be updated. Or you can subscribe to my post via the gadget to the right where it says "Follow by Email".

Thanks for reading and look forward to the next update.

Introduction

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for checking out my blog. First off, I just want to say that I am in no way a great writer. So if you came looking for immaculate stories and flawless writing, then I think you came to the wrong blog. I am most comfortable just writing the way that I speak, but if you don't like that then you can just look at the pretty pictures. ;D.  I also tend to ramble so ... you have been warned.

So the other day I had a group chat with a bunch of friends and I showed them what I was working on. I am really big on getting feedback from others as often as I can while I am working. I think it helps you get better in many ways. From being able to see something that you would normally glance over to being able to receive criticism from others. While we were talking I mentioned how I had gotten frustrated with one project and so I started the one that I am currently working on. And by doing so, I now have another unfinished project on my hands. So one of my friends suggested that I should start a blog. That way it will keep me motivated to keep working on projects that I start and actually finish them. And here we are. 

So without further adieu, I hope you enjoy my work. And please comment and critique as much as you like. In the end every little bit helps me and I appreciate that you would take the time to look at my work and help me out.