Been trying to do this in sub-D as much as I can, so far its working great, starting to get the hang of it, knowing how to avoid weird pinching etc, ...
Been basing myself off just 1 perspective reference, and not even bringing it in maya, just, unforced, playing around. Im happy with the results so far.
made a quick render setup for mah head,
As I feel it, the materials need lots more work, and Im not happy at all about the eyes ... but It's time to consider this finished as it is, and move on to something new. something ... more Zbrush-ish
Last time I wrote here, I was struggling with attaching my ear to the rest of the head. I found a nice way to loop my edges resulting in nothing but quads, and still a nice smooth result:
After this was done, all that remained was starting to unwrap my UV's, and add the texturing.
Unwrapping the UV's seemed a daunting task, especially for something organic like a human head. I spent some time manually tweaking, and going through it meticulously. Until I watched a tutorial explaining that since maya 2009, there is a relax and unfold tool available in Maya's UV editor. Messing around with those I had a basic unwrap I could work with. now came the hard part: Texturing.
Texturing is something I've never really gotten into. So my photoshop skills in the area are quite lacking. I found it very hard deforming my pictures as to correspond with my UV map. So again, I cheated a bit.
Using Adobe photoshop extended, it's possible to create a 3d layer. Using an exported version of my head model, I created a 3d layer in photoshop. Texturing then becomes a game of adjusting a layer above your 3d model, then merge it down onto the model. This is the tutorial I used to achieve my results:
I then created a specular map by desaturating and manually adjusting here and there, and I ended up with these maps:
These are far from perfect, mainly due to the lack of decent photoshop skills. But for now, they'll do the job!
the eyes I created separately and still need some work on their materials:
