UVW Mapping and Skin Textures

This was the most difficult part of the creation of the head model. I began by adding an unwrap UVW modifier onto the head model and placing the cylindrical gizmo over the head. Then, after adding a checkered material to the head I began editing the UVWs in order to give a smooth material. By selecting trouble areas of vertices I could use the relax tool in order to try to alleviate the problems. I found this quite hard to do, possibly due to some troubles with model structure around the side of the head.

The next task was to use pelt mapping in order to solve the UV problems of the ear. By moving and scaling the stretcher, and then pulling the strings into the correct direction, I could simulate pelt pulling in order to pull out the vertices of the ear. by now the shape of the UV points was too large, so I had to scale the ear down to the correct size.

Having now got one side of the face and one ear complete, I could simply mirror these across to give the full UVW-mapping of the face and then render the UVW map.

The next stage was to create a skin texture in Adobe Photoshop CS5, using this UVW map as a guide. I am fairly confident with Photoshop and managed to create a reasonably good skin texture here, cutting and pasting sections of skin from the reference photos into the right places.

After this was finished, a bump map was also created in Photoshop. this was done in order to bring out more detail in the skin. In 3D Studio Max, it was then a case of creating a suitable material, using the mix option in the material browser to create a suitable blend of the skin map and bump map in order to bring out maximum detail in the skin

I did have a lot of trouble with the UVW mapping part of this assignment. The final result wasn't brilliant and there are a lot of areas which could be improved. I believe the Photoshop work went fairly well, the problems were caused in UVW-mapping in 3DS Max (and possibly stemmed from structure problems). This is something that I will definitely need to work on.

Eye and Eyelash Creation

In order to make the eyes, I began by going to the extended primitives menu and creating a capsule. I converted this to an editable poly and removed the middle ring of faces, joining the two sides left to form a rough sphere shape. I then cloned this shape by holding down shift and using the scale tool.

I applied a MeshSmooth modifier and on the outer sphere pulled the vertices at one end to give a slight bulge shape. On the inner sphere I pushed in the vertices of one end in order to flatten that end. I now had a basic eyeball. On the inner sphere I could apply the eyeball texture, whilst I made the outer sphere of a water material in order to give the eyes a wet look.

The next step was to create the eyelashes. I did this by creating a few different spline curves and extruding thin cylinder shapes along these splines. I then changed the taper parameter so that the cylinders grew thinner towards the end.

In order to fit these eyelashes I simply cloned lots of cylinders and placed them around the eyesocket. In the final render the eyelashes aren't that noticeable, however they do give crucial detail to the eye area of the model.

Ear Creation

To create the ear I began in the same way as I had created the face - by using the reference planes to lay out quads and then pull the vertices out in order to make the shape 3-dimensional. However, the ear is a very complex shape and I found this more difficult to model than the face.

One tool that came in very useful in modelling the ear was the chamfer tool. This enabled me to create better canals in the ear and achieve a more organic shape. Once again, the use of the TurboSmooth modifier allowed me to smooth the ear into a better finish.

I also found it quite hard to attach the ear. As with the back of the head, this was done using the weld and target weld tools. I started this process by removing faces from the head. I then created some new faces on the ear which could be used to join to the head.

In the end I think I achieved quite a good ear design. It does look slightly rigid and could be improved in the future for a more organic look, however the overall shape is quite well designed.