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.