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.