My Entry for Blend 2 Life 2015

Artwork Works in Progress
1

I decided it was time to update my avatar on Facebook (The current one is a Family Christmas Portrait which going into May seems out of date.)

I wanted to learn more about UV mapping - texture mapping and particles, so an updated model of myself was in order.

I’m posting this here before updating my Facebook Avatar.

There were several things that I did wrong when I built the model.

  • The ear must have had some messed up Geometry. When I tried to unwrap it, there were several faces that would not unwrap correctly. I hit CTRL-N on them without effect. Finally I deleted them and replaced them with new. This worked to some effect but the new faces would not accept the UV Mapped material.
  • Blender would crash every time I tried to introduce a second Particle system, so I extended the hair to include the eyebrows and my mustache. My Eyebrows are not anywhere near that bushy. (My mustache actually looks like the model quite a bit of the time much to my wife’s disappointment.) To reduce the bushiness of the eyebrows I greatly reduced the number of child particles and added more parents to my hair. That helped but my computer probably hates me every time I hit Render.
  • I never tried to create a specularity map and my texture maps are not as detailed as I could/should go. (This is the area I would truly love advice.)

Assuming I can learn what to do an maybe by 2015 I would be trying to enter a Blend 2 life contest.

Attachments

keith_export.jpg720×891 51.9 KB

Keith2_Circle.jpg1024×1024 13.8 KB

2

First things first. it’s a good start, but hair is probably the last thing you will want to add to your model. The texture is too plain, and I can understand that it might be hard to determine what color should go where in some cases, so I suggest baking ambient occlusion. (If this sounds completely unfamiliar I’m willing to explain in more detail via mail or messenger). Also, is it possible for us too get to see the wire?

Daniel

3

one simple easy thing to play around with is using Subsurface Scattering (SSS) on the skin. Then you don’t have to do hardly any extra work but you’ll know how SSS works. God, I’m horrible at explaining things. Sorry.

4

Here is a shot of the wireframe. In it you can see the faces on the ear which I had replaced. For some reason they wouldn’t accept the texture from the UV map, so I used a vertex group for the ears,

The other shot is the normal map I used.

Attachments

keith2_wire.jpg1024×768 150 KB

Keith2_Circle_texture.jpg1024×1024 50.3 KB