3d face of real person?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hello,

I want to ask something. Is there a way that you can make a 3d face of a real person or is that very difficult. I want to make a suprise for my son and daughter which I don’t see a lot due to a divorce and that makes it quite hard for me and I want to surprise them and try to make a 3d animation with them in it…But I just start with blender and I don’t have the finances to pay somebody to create that for me.

Anyone can help me out please

Patrick

2

Hi, I would use a base mesh from blendswap.com and work with projection painting.
But you need good photos, front and side view.

Gruss, mib.

3

Check out 123D Catch; it’s a free service that will stitch a series of photos into a (most of the time fairly decent) 3D model for you. There’s several examples in the gallery of people using it to sculpt heads.

I’ve tried it on my own head, and it creates a decent mesh, but the stitching can use some help, though:

  • Move the camera, not the subject; that’s critical. The lights in the scene need to stay the same for the stitching to work.
  • Don’t use the camera’s flash; again, lights need to stay the same.
  • Wear a shirt with a collar, and patterns over the shoulders. You need color differences for the stitching to find features to match. A plain T’s round neck and flat color is too monotonous to match most of the time.
  • If doing a full head capture, put a post-it note on the back of your head. You look stupid doing the capture, but the back of people’s heads usually don’t have enough features for the stitching to differentiate. A square of bright color lying mostly flat with the rest of your hair gives it something to match. Then edit that part of the mesh flat in Blender afterward (pretty simple, since the paper doesn’t add that much depth to the capture).

Practical upshot of doing it this way is you automatically get the textures mapped to the object, stitched from an amalgam of the photos taken. The downside is the mesh is really triangulated and not at all optimized for editing or animation. If you want to do more with the mesh afterward, import it into Blender and give it a subsurf modifier, and then use the snap to mesh option to “draw on top of” that object, making proper mesh loops for a human head.

4

midnight426, he can’t make the children pose for pictures since he wants to surprise them. As much as I hate to say it, I think this one is a lost cause for a beginner.

5

@MadMinstrel
LOL
Let’s say the truth…
Yes, it is very difficult. Not for a newbie, neither for the majority of skilled blenderartists users.

If you could do it look as a photo, after years of learning sculpting-painting-photograph or anything else… then, your son and daughter won’t even understand what you’re showing them. “Well it’s a kind of a photo dad… where is the big deal with it?”
It happened to me anyway LOL

6

even if you get them to pose and use 123D Catch, your work is far from over. you would need to re-topologize and then rig the models, then animate them, which is also kinda hard. I respect the idea, just bear in mind that even if you get a great result from 123D Catch, you’re only through with about 15% of the work of creating a good animation.

7

Personally I think that this would take way too long for a beginner. And the worst part is that non-artists probably won’t even understand how much effort you put into this. If you want to learn more about blender, then you can take up this project, but if you want to surprise your kids, then I think this is not the best way. Just my personal opinion.

8

there are good tut at cgcookie that can be used as intro for head nad body modelling but it’s a lot of work
to do it for the first time
but if you ready to spent the time go ahead and have fun with blender

salutations