Bibliography

Stahlberg, S, (2005), D'artiste: Character Modeling, USA, Ballistic Publishing

Plantec , P, (2004), Virtual Humans: a build-it-yourself kit, complete with software and step-by step instructions, USA, AMACOM Publishing

Ratner, P, (2003), 3-D human modeling and animation, London, John Wiley and Sons

Osipa , J, (2007), Stop Staring: facial modeling and animation done right , London, John Wiley and Sons

Roberts, K, (2006), Making Faces, UK, Wellcome Trust Publishing

Simon, M, (2005), Facial Expressions: A visual Reference for Artists, USA, Watson-Guptill Publishing

Loomis, A, (1970), Drawing the Head and Hands, London, Viking Publishing
 
Hildre, B, (2005), Modelling Heads and Faces in Clay, London, A & C Black Publishers
 
Halim, A, (2008), Human Anatomy: Head, Neck and Brain, India, CBS Publishers & Distributors
 
Murdock, K & Allen, E, (2006), Edgeloop Character Modeling For 3D Professionals Only, London, John Wiley & Sons
 
Russo, M, (2005), Polygonal Modeling: Basic and Advanced Techniques, USA, Jones & Bartlett Publishers
 
Danaher, S, (2008) [online], Model the Perfect 3D Face, Available from http://www.computerarts.co.uk%20accessed/Accessed on 17.02.2010

Evaluation

I was quite surprised by this brief as it went completely against my expectations, I had thought that since I had done it before the clay sculpting would be the easiest part of the brief and that making a maquette that would look like my subject would not be too great a problem. However on practice this proved to be quite the opposite and working with the polymer clay became very problematic and complicated. This brief also went against my expectations in that when I realised I would have to make a digital sculpt in Mudbox, I was apprehensive and thought that it would be extremely complex, however I found the software to be very intuitive and removed a lot of the material issues that I had with the clay maquette . At the very minimum, at least by Mudbox sculpt did not degrade over time.

Although neither my clay maquette nor my Mudbox sculpt I was perfectly happy with, I learned a great deal about proportion, the topology of the face, it's contour and working in a 3D space that gives me a greater understanding of this area of Game Design.

Back with my polymer clay sculpt things were not going as smoothly, the Super-Sculpey although superior to the clay I had previously used was not as versatile as I’d hoped it would be. Try as I might I could not get my figures overall head shape to hold once I was doing the features, shaping the supraorbital process would deform the forehead and so on. Unfortunately there was no freeze function in the real-world. I solved this by making the head shape in air-drying clay, letting it dry and then sculpting over the top of it with clay and super-sculpey later on. Though I was using two separate types of clay, I decided that it was the only way I could think of to get over the issues.


Once the maquette was finished, I applied a matt paint spray to the entire head to make it look more even.

Though my maquette was in effect finished, I was far from happy with it. Small delicate areas such as the eyelids and lips took several attempts and a number of materials to be able to get something akin to how I wanted it to look.

Still in the Mud

As I’ve now got the features on my digital sculpt as close as I can get them to my subjects photograph I have now started the texturing of the model. We have been taught UV mapping and the techniques for imprinting these, however I found the technique of replicating and transposing sections of the subjects skin onto the model does not work well enough for me. Whichever technique I use, either stamping or projecting, none of them give a particularly three dimensional feel to the skin. So to create a skin that looks like it has the ‘depth’ of real skin I have been experimenting with the ‘spray’ tool and using one of the stamp presets.

Below are examples of sprayed skin that I experimented with to try and create a skin-like texture...

Obviously I would have to use different types and strengths of these sprays for the different areas of the face, smooth for the eyes, more bumpy for the cheeks etc but this could be corrected once an all over skin tone was applied.

I eventually found one I was happy with and applied it to the skin and then began the process of painting/colouring the model. I used numerous paint layers, layering them on top of each other and altered the strengths before I got a tone I liked. In the skin on my reference model much like the issues with the hair, I found that a lot of the variants in colour were more to do with shadowing than actual coloration of the skin. However there were ample enough areas to apply variations in order to give a ‘life’ to the skin, such as a bluish hue around the eyes etc.

The eyes themselves were painted separately and with a small enough brush/airbrush so that iris and pupil detail could be applied, perhaps the detail wouldn’t be seen but it would help them look realistic.

I came across a few issues with the colouring such as the fact that once colours were layered over each other, if a new colour was applied it would react with the colour layers beneath it and create an odd hue.

After a few final tweeks I checked back on the tutorials and literature to see if there was any more detailing or adjustments I could make before I finished but alas any further detailing would require other software packages such as Lightwave, zBrush etc and I wasn’t ready to make that jump yet.