Week 6-Group Presentation of Idea

I believe the group presentation went reasonably well. The PowerPoint presentation which was created beforehand covered everything which had been discussed up to that point in time, therefore giving details of all the plans we had already made.

I felt our idea was received quite well, even though we were given some points to consider. These suggestions were considered individually in turn allowing us to decide which to incorporate into the project and which to not. Several of the suggested ideas were taken on board; the only one which was not was the addition of a person. We decided against this as a group as we felt we would not have enough time to model and animate a good character along with an accurate steam engine in an environment where it would have been used. We thought it would be better to include slightly less and do it well in contrast to doing more at a poorer quality.

From this point the group will finalise our plans for stage two of the module until we are all happy with the proposed animation. From this the storyboard will be created and modelling the different parts will begin.

Evaluation of Head Modelling

I am pleased with the outcome of my head, especially as I felt uncertain about whether I would be able to complete the task.

Identifying the topology was something I found time consuming to begin with, but thinking back I believe this was due to me being very dubious about marking the topology incorrectly as this was a key part of the assignment. However, my confidence did grow and I was able to complete the topology of the ear and back of the head much more easily.

My experience of aligning the vertexes of the mesh to the profile image was very similar to that of the topology. I was not quite sure at the start about the spacing of the vertexes, but after working on a section I found the remainder less daunting.

The modelling was something I very much enjoy, unlike the creation of the materials. This is an area of 3Ds max which I consider to be my weakness as I can seldom achieve exactly what I want. Also, it involved a lot of work in Photoshop. This software is something I am happy to work with if I have experience with the specific tool, these mainly being the basic ones. However, the tutorials used features I had not used before such as the liquify window and others where I struggled to achieve quite what I want, like the hue/saturation and clone stamp tool.

The texture map, despite many hours of hard work, is still not as smooth a colour transitions as I would have liked. Although I am proud of the way I used the hue/saturation window to adjust the skin tone of differing areas.

The bump and specular map both went well in comparison, but I do put this down to the tasks not being as complicated.

All in all I do believe the head has turned out quite well and has some resemblance to myself, I am disappointed with the ear as both the modelling and mapping did not go as well as I would have liked. If I had time this is something I would continue to work on until it is at a standard which I am satisfied with.

Week 5-Producing and Applying the Bump and Specular Maps

The next part of the project was to create a bump map. To begin I opened the jpeg version of my texture map in Photoshop. Here I made the colour map into an editable layer and then selected the add new layer button. I filled the new layer with a mid-grey tone and moved it behind all the other layers.

Afterwards I went back to the colour map layer and went to the image menu, down to adjustments and selected desaturate. This removed all the colour information from the layer, leaving me with tones of grey only.

I then opened the levels window and with the sliders tried to get the best representation of the greyscale values. To get this representation I move the two outer sliders to the points on the graph where the graph representation started and stopped, resulting in a greater contrast between light and dark.

Following this I applied the high pass filter to this layer. This made the surface look embossed, but more importantly brought out areas of highlight and shadow.

Next I put the new material into 3Ds max as a bump bitmap. I was pleased with this to an extent, but the seams, such as that around the ears, were raised quite a lot. To overcome this I went back to Photoshop and used the clone stamp tool to remove the ridged areas on the high pass layer. When removing the raised parts I was careful what I used as the source area. I did not want a hair texture on the edge of the skin and vice versa, so each time I paid close attention to what part of the head the edge belonged to.

After some time I had managed to remove all of the raised areas.

The addition of the bump map did created an uneven surface, however I felt it was not a realistic representation of the formation of skin. So I applied a mix bitmap to this layer, keeping the material I just created as one to be mixed. The second bitmap I chose for the mix was the noise preset material. I reduced the scale of this to 0.1 and set the noise type to fractal. I then set the mix amount of the two to 100%.

I felt the bump map was now much better than before, but I did feel it looked slightly grainy. Firstly I reduced the size of the noise map to 3. This did help but I still was not completely satisfied.

To resolve this I changed the mix amount. I tested out a few values to try to get the best mix value between the bump map I created and the noise preset. I settled on the value of 68%.

I felt this mix level worked really well as the texture was quite subtle. In previous steps the texture has been visible from a long distance away which is quite unrealistic for a head so I am pleased as the one above gives the suggestion of skin, but only when close up.

As I am happy with this I decided to go on to create the specular map. The first thing I did for this was to take the psd file of the bump map I had just created so I could use this as a template.

To start I duplicated the bump map layer. Then I went to the image menu, adjustments and opened the levels window. Here I repositioned the sliders to get a darker version of my head image. The reason for this was that a specular map sees white areas as reflective and black areas as non-reflective, so this allowed me to virtually start with a blank canvas before marking on areas where I wanted the specular to be. Once again I moved the outer sliders to the edges of the graph. Then, to get it as dark as possible without loosing the image itself I moved the middle slider closer to the white one on the right than the black.

Afterwards I selected the paintbrush tool and set the opacity to 20% before making the brush size quite large. I then selected the paint colour as white and marked on the areas of my face which would be oily and therefore have a shine to them on a new layer. I also painted on the areas which would be moist and therefore have a sheen, such as the lips and the eyes. On the occasions I needed to neaten the markings I used the eraser with the opacity of 6% as I found this did not remove too much of the white.

To begin with I did find this quite difficult as it was hard to identify where the areas of the face were on the black surface. To overcome this problem I reduced the opacity of the black specular layer and made the bump layer invisible so I could use the colour layer underneath as a guide.

I felt that I had identified all the areas which would have specular and so went on to apply a Gaussian blur to the layer. I set the blur radius to 10.1 pixels as I felt this created a steady transition from black to white without loosing higher levels of specular in specific areas.

I then went into smax and applied this as the specular map for the head material. When I rendered the image I felt the reflection was too much and as a result the surface on my head looked quite unnatural.

Currently with and without the specular map the skin did not have the realistic quality I wanted. So, I returned to Photoshop and put the texturizer filter on the reflective layer. I chose the texture of sandstone and then set the scale value to 54% and the relief to 2. I hoped this would make the contents of this layer slightly uneven and as a result reduce the reflection.

Applying this filter had made the white surface gain a slightly grainy appearance, breaking up the large blocks of white.

Next I returned to 3Ds max to see what affect this has had on the material when applied to my model.

I was really pleased with the outcome of this as now the specular was slightly less sheen. The extra subtleness had given the skin texture a more natural quality and so I was pleased with this.

I had now completed the specular and so decided to look at my head as a whole. However, when I did this I was disappointed as the material around the ear no longer lined up properly. I am not sure why this is, the only possible reason I could come up with was that since I applied the turbo-smooth the un-matching joins have become more noticeable. This is something which I felt I needed to fix and so reopened the texture map in Photoshop so I could make alterations.

Once the psd file was opened and I was looking at the ear area with the guide visible on top I remembered just how confusing this part was to begin with. Before starting the alterations I went to the edit window in the unwrap UVW level in smax to try to use the vertexes as a guide. I did do this the first time I tried to apply the material to the ear and struggled to understand how the ear had unwrapped, but I thought it would be worth another go.

I spent some time selecting individual vertexes around the edge of the unwrapped ear and seeing where the vertex corresponded to in the viewport. After some time I realised that the seam at the back of the ear run along the base of the unwrap map. This is the area where I had hair on the back of the ear which I could not get rid of before; however now I knew the location of the problem I was able to use the clone stamp tool to fix it.

I continued to use this process until I was happy with the appearance of the back of the ear. I then moved on to work on the front.

Here I used a similar method to before, but instead of solely using the clone tool I also used the eyedropper and brush tools. This is because I was unable to clone some of the tones necessary as the ones around the ear were so different to those which would be nearby on the head. Therefore I used the eyedropper tool to select the tone from the main head piece, used the edit unwrap window to identify where the related vertexes would be on the unwrapped ear and using the brush tool to apply the colour to this area. I did work with the clone and paintbrush at 50% opacity as this would allow the new tones to be blended more easily with the colours which were already there.

I then repeated the above processes to improve the other ear.

This is an improvement on what I had previously, but I am still not completely happy with this. I would like to do some more improvements on these, but unfortunately I have run out of time. I am quite disappointed I have been unable to master the material application.

Week 5-Completing the Texture Map

Last week I started to create the texture map. This went reasonably well, however it still needs some work due to the white spaces and differences in colour between the different areas of the face. The first thing I did this week was to continue the forehead material around the side of the head and above the eye socket. For this I used the clone stamp tool.

When I looked at this on the model in 3Ds max I was pleased with how this part went. However, whilst I was doing this I noticed the material around the eye still did not quite cover the whole of the surface to the edge. To improve this part I selected the warp tool in Photoshop and adjusted the corner points to try to get the shape I needed. Once I completed this task for the bottom eyelid I repeated the process for top.

There was a reduction in the size of the white areas around the eye, but it was still visible. I did consider warping these sections of material again, but I was worried about doing this too much and making the area unrealistic. Instead I selected the clone stamp tool to create an extra area of pixels on the inside of the eye. I cloned a particularly large area on the inside of the eye as this area had the largest white area.

I was pleased with the area around the eye generally, apart from the obvious join between the two materials above the eye. The first thing I did was to use the eraser tool at 50% opacity to soften the join area.

This did make some improvement, but it was still too visible for my liking. Following this I thought of using a blur to soften the edge more, but I would have to do it on a separate mask layer so I could apply the blur to a specific section without affecting the rest of that part of the material. So, I started by selecting the material above the eye before adding a mask to the layer. Then, with the selection still highlighted I inverted the selection and used the bucket tool to fill the remainder of the mask layer in black.

Next I used the lasso tool to select the top overlap of material sections. Then, while I was still in mask mode, opened the Gaussian blur window and applied this to the radius of 1.5 pixels to the selected area.

Originally I put a Gaussian blur to the whole of the mask, but this not only reduced the obviousness of the join but also resulted in the loss of clarity of this part of the texture. Therefore I undid these steps and used the method I described previously.

The appearance of this adaptation was not quite as good as I thought it would be on the map in Photoshop, but when I looked at it applied on my head in 3Ds max I was much more satisfied.

Next I went on to erase around the hairline join as there was still a difference in skin tone at the join. Once again I used the eraser at 50% opacity and removed all the skin up until the hair. This then created a definite, clean transition between the hair and skin.

Next I looked at the texture map as a whole. I was really happy with the parts I had worked on so far this week, but not happy overall. This is due to several parts being a different tone to others. I decided the best way to tackle this problem was to identify the areas which needed changing colour wise and which Photoshop tools to use to do this. I decided to keep the tone which is found around the forehead and eye for two reasons. Firstly due to many parts of the texture map having this colouring already and so there would be fewer parts I needed to change. Also, as I had already done a lot of work on this section which I am quite happy with and did not want to risk ruining it.

To start I selected the cheek section of the material map and opened up the hue/saturation window. I then used each of the sliders in turn to alter the colour until I felt the section had changed to the exact tone I was looking for. This took some time as I had to keep altering each setting as I struggled to get what I wanted with my first attempt. When I was happy with the cheek I repeated this process to get the colour for the area which would be in front of the ear.

I then returned to smax to see how the alterations I had made would look on my model.

I felt this had gone well so far and so continued to use the clone stamp tool to join the different areas, to begin with I filled in the area around the cheek and nose. This was quite simple as each section had a similar tone to the skin and therefore fitted together easily.

However, at the side of the cheek I had created a lighter patch which did not fit in that well with the surrounding skin tone. To resolve this I used the clone stamp tool again, but first reduced the opacity to 50% so I could build up the colour gradually until it was the tone I required. I then selected a darker toned area as the source and painted this over the top. This let me apply the basic colour and then with the eraser tool also set to 50% opacity I was able to neaten the join areas.

The outcome was a much more even tone, although I was still unable to get an exact match. Despite this I decided to leave this section of the map as I was unable to improve it any more and did not want to overwork it as this could result in ruining the improvement.

Next I looked at the material as a whole so far. Generally I was pleased with the area I had worked on, except for the part above the eye. Currently I have made quite a few alterations to this but I am still unable to get a transition between that and the area above it which was unnoticeable. I decided to try altering the tone as previously I had not tried this and felt that if some of the redness was removed it may help.

To begin I selected that layer and opened the hue/saturation window. I played with the settings to see what effect each would have on the selected part of the material and also what level I should change it to for the best result. I found that increasing both the hue and lightness controls slightly removed the unwanted redness. This did not produce a perfect transition but increasing these values further created either a yellow skin tone or made the colour too washed out. As it was an improvement on what I had previously I decided to apply these settings.

The final step I took to editing the eye material was to neaten the join with the inner eye as the overlap of materials was currently quite obvious, especially around the tear duct and the nose. For this I used the eraser tool again with the opacity of 50% to remove the white tone under the top eyelid. This gave a much smoother transition between the layers.

At this point I observed the material in 3Ds max on the modelled face. The texture on the upper half of the face seemed to work well, in particular the material around the eye and the transition of the tone. As I was happy with the top half of the texture map I decided to go on to the lower part.

With the clone tool I continued to fill in the gaps in the material for the right hand side of the head in Photoshop until this task was complete. This went reasonably well, although I was left with a bold tonal difference where there was the overlap of layers above the chin. Using a combination of the clone stamp and eraser tool, both of which I set the opacity to 50%, I lessened the appearance of this. Using this combination of methods did not make a perfect material the whole way across the join; however it is only a slight imperfection and is not easily noticeable. Therefore I will leave this as I doubt I will be able to make any changes in the remaining time scale which will improve this area drastically.

The final step I took to creating the texture map for this side of the head was to make the guide layer visible so I could be sure that I had applied the texture to the whole of the mesh. I did find that there were a couple of corner quadrants which I had missed, such as by the gap for the ear and the bottom of the neck and so used the clone tool to add materials in these areas. After this I felt this part of the texture map was now complete.

Following the completion of the material map I merged all the layers in Photoshop which included part of the texture, turning them into one solid material.

Afterwards I duplicated the layer with the material on it, flipped it horizontally and aligned it with the original using the guide to help me.

Then I looked at the material as a whole in smax. I was reasonably pleased with the material apart from where the two joined along the centre of my face as there was a big difference in tone and made the join obvious. This is something which I feel needs to be worked on before going any further.

To begin I used the eraser with a 50% opacity to reduce the visibility of the overlap. This was effective on the majority of the areas along the seam; however I felt that some still needed more work when I looked at them in 3Ds max again.

For the next correction I worked on the area around the lips. To start I used the eraser tool to remove the darker skin tones on the top layer, leaving the lighter tone underneath as is on the opposite side. When I returned to smax this had been corrected, but I noticed part of the lip material overflowed onto the surrounding skin slightly and the shadow surrounding the lips was not aligned correctly.

To resolve theses issues I went back to Photoshop and opened this layer in the liquify window. Then with the liquify paintbrush tool I moved the pixels which were causing the problem.

I felt the liquify tool had worked well on the lips and so I used this to try to remove the line down the centre of the chin. However, this was not as successful as I could not remove the line with this method. Instead I went into the select menu, down to modify and selected smooth and set the smooth radius to 10. I then finished this off using the blur tool. Eventually I got the fluid surface I wanted.

This looked good in Photoshop and so I looked at it in 3Ds max. This was much better than the original and decided to go on.

After I opened a photograph of myself, selected the ear and the surrounding area and pasted it into the texture map on a new layer. I then used the transform tool to scale it down and position it in the correct position using the guide to aid me. I then rotated it by 90 degrees clockwise before flipping it horizontally. However, when I looked at it in smax I was disappointed as I had positioned it incorrectly.

To help me work out how to position the ear material I selected the unwrap UVW modifier and opened the edit window. Here I selected the vertex points on the unwrapped ear to see where this corresponded to on the main unwrapped mesh. Mainly I tried to work out where the hair behind the ear needed to be located as I felt this would be the easiest part to identify and locate when repositioning the ear material.

I returned to Photoshop and used the information I gained from the unwrap mesh to position the ear texture. To align this I flipped it both horizontally and vertically.

The ear texture was now facing the correct direction, but it did not cover all of the mesh. Therefore I turned on the guide layer and referred to this when cloning the texture. I made sure that I covered all of the mesh area and that I cloned the texture into the right guide segments as otherwise the material might swap between hair and skin. When I looked at this part of the texture map on the model I was reasonably pleased with the result.

However, when I rotated the head around I noticed there was some hair on the back of the ear. To resolve this I used the liquify tool to remove any hair from the top and side of the ear. I did this by brushing the skin coloured pixels in the direction of the hair until I reached the edge of the ear. I did find I needed to repeat this process as during my initial attempt I had not moved the pixels far enough.

Despite making changes in the liquify window there was still hair on the back of the ear. Instead I decided to use the clone stamp tool to add the skin tone between the hair and ear. For the source point I used the area underneath the ear. Whilst doing this I did keep referring back to smax to make sure I did not remove too much of the hair.

Once cloned the surface colour was quite uneven and there was a sharp dividing line between the ear itself and the skin behind it. So, I used the blur tool to make this more even.

After this I tried to align the shadow on the photo to the parts of the ear where I had created the indents during modelling. Looking at the ear with the material on it was not just a case of using the move tool to reposition it. Instead I used the warp tool to change the shape of the ear on the texture map in Photoshop. Although I had several attempts at warping this part of the material I was unable to get the darker areas of the material to be located in the indents of the ear.

I undone all of the warping and instead tried to use the rotate tool to position the map more appropriately. This time I selected the transform tool and using the rotate feature attempted to position this more appropriately. However, this was also unhelpful.

At this point I felt lining the map up to the model was an impossible task. As it was only a short time to the deadline and I wanted to get the texture map completed in time and I had no idea of an alternative tool I could use I decided to remove the areas of shadow in the image and let the lighting in 3Ds max create areas of shadow. I was aware the shadow would not be as dark or realistic as it would not be a part of an actual ear canal, however I felt this really was my only option and just hoped it would not affect the appearance of my model too much.

So to remove the dark tones I selected the clone stamp tool and, with a lighter part of the ear as the source, I painted over the darker areas. This resulted in this part of the ear being a similar skin colour to the rest of the ear. To start I tried it out on a small section before looking at it in smax.

This went well on the trial area and did not look too bad when I placed it on my model. Therefore I decided to continue with this on the remainder of the shadow where the ear was indented. Once I had cloned over the whole area of shadow I also cloned over an area of the ear lobe which had a bold highlight as I felt this did not work well in smax. Finally I used the blur tool to smooth the area I had cloned.

Looking at the ear material on the model I felt reasonably pleased with its appearance. I felt this would be the best that I could do and so decided to go on. So, I duplicated the layer and flipped it horizontally before using the move tool to align it underneath the guide. I then checked that it fitted on the model properly and made alterations to its position accordingly.

This worked really well in 3Ds max from a distance, however when I zoomed in I found that texture map did not cover the material properly. This was like this particularly around the eyes and nose.

To solve the errors with the material I opened the normal map which I rendered from the edit unwrap UVW window and pasted it into a new layer on the material map file. I then used the brush tool to draw around the edge of the surfaces which I identified by the colours meeting the black or where the surface inverted which I identified by a quick change into another colour.

Around the eyes I used the lines as a guide as to how far to clone the texture around it to. Then, with the blur tool, I neatened the cloned area to make the colour smoother and less patchy. When I returned to smax to see what impact this had had on the material I was very pleased with the result as there was no longer any white sections.

The final step for the material on the eye was to fill in the centre of the eye. To do this I opened the colour picker window and selected a dark skin-like tone quite similar to the surrounding area. Then, with the brush tool I painted this colour into the centre of each eye.

I then went on to correct the material around the nostrils as currently the shaded areas were not located in the indents. To do this I opened the liquify window and set layer with the nostril outlines as a guide. Then with the liquify brush tool I moved the pixels which were the darker area of the nostril into the guide area.

This was really successful for the first nostril and so I repeated this for the second. Unfortunately the second nostril did not align with the guide as easily and it resulted in me having to have several attempts at the positioning of this before I was happy. Eventually both nostrils sat in the position I required them to. The final step for the material in this area was to neaten it as with the work I completed in the liquify window it had become slightly messy. For this I used the clone stamp tool and just refined the colour of the pixels where there was a darker shade than was required.

The next step in the texture map was to include a background colour. This task was quite simple as all I needed to do was create a new layer and apply a fill colour very similar to my skin tone. I placed this layer under all the materials I copied from the photographs as these were more accurate materials and I only wanted this layer to be a base.

At this point I looked at the model overall and, although I was trying to evaluate the work I had just completed I was unable to focus on this as the eyes were just too large. So, the next thing I did was to edit the eye material. I thought it may help if the iris and pupils were not as big and so in the UVW map rollout I reduced the size of the material from 10.667 to 9.667. While doing this I was conscious that I did not reduce this too much and make the material overly small. When I compared this to the other eye I felt it looked better. I did believe it still was too large, but I do think that this may be due to me not including eyelids on the model. I decided to keep the material this size and so made the same alterations to the other eyeball.

I then looked at the texture map on my head and noticed some errors. Firstly I realised I had two partings. This error occurred as I created the material for the right hand side of the face and then flipped it without making any alterations. Also the join in between the two sides of the head was not clean. To resolve this I used the clone stamp tool to remove the second parting and made sure the material went past the outer line of the guide.

As well as this I noticed that there was not a smooth transition between the parts of the hair material which I had layered on top of one another when initially creating it. I once again used the clone tool to try to smooth this out, but this time I set it to 50% opacity as I felt this would allow me to make the transition more fluid without having to paint in a large area. Reducing the opacity was especially helpful as I was able to balance out the areas of different tones in the hair quite easily.

This gave me the final texture map.

Finally I applied a turbo-smooth modifier to my head to give it a smooth finish.

I have now completed and am happy with the texture map. Next I will use this to produce the bump and specular maps.