Adding the Skin to the head

Now that the skin map has been completed on photoshop, it was time to take that material and move it into 3DS max.

Adding the new material into a material I applied this to my head and for the first couple of attempts this didn't go to well and had to backtrack a few steps by tweaking the UVW map and some of the skin positions, I was finally happy with my basic skin texture and could continue on with the rest of the material editing.

Here you can see the skin is all one colour tone and dosnt look like skin at all, my head looks ill, to get around this I added a bump map of the skin texture to create a better looking skin with different tones and colours.














Here is my skin wth the new additions, I was very happy with the result, all that was left to do now was make it less smooth and add some more detail to the skin itself.

As you can see there is now allot more colour and tone differentiation .

Adding the material [stage 3]

The next stage to adding the material was to add the skin onto the guide, this was done by cutting out parts of the face to and dropping them in position onto the guide and using the morph tool, this would build up into a stretched out version of my face which would be used as my skin for the 3d head.

After some tweaking and getting certain areas into position I was pleased with the result, below is the picture of my finished skin map.










With this map I decided to not add my hair onto it, the reason for this is because I had long hair making the hair flow was very difficult, instead I am going to use the Hair and fur tool on 3DS max in a later post this will become clearer.

Adding the material [stage 2]

The next stage to adding the material was to take the mapping co-ordinates in the previouse stage and turn them into guidelines.

This was done by selecting tools > Render UVW template > change width to 2048 length 1028 > Render UV Template

This gave me a black and white guideline which I would later use in photoshop.











I then Turned these lines blue which would act as my templae for the next stages of the photoshop part of the project.

Adding the material [stage 1]

Once the checkered map was applied it was time to start adding the skin to the model, this was a log process and all started with the template of my face, this was created via the UVW unwrap scroll menu on the right and selecting parameters.

I had to move each vertex to fit a rough shape of the head to make sue the checkered map was as close to squares as physically possible.

Once I was happy with the face I mirrored the parameters and welded the seam down the centre to finish of the mapping co-ordinates part of the model.

Here you can see both the parameters welding together with the ears below.

Checkerd material for the skin [Mapping]

Once I was happy with the shape of my model, the next part was to finally start adding material to the head, this would be the basic start of the skin.

The first thing I had to do was create a checkered material which would form the base for creating the material, this was added to my face, once this was applied I used the UVW unwrap modifier to the head, with a bit of tweaking I got the map in a good position to allow me to continue with the mapping process.

Here is checkerd material added to my head model.

The ear

The next part of the model was to create the ear, this was done by using the exact same process as creating the 3D face, by drawing quads onto the reference plane for the ear.

Once this was done the ear was created in 3D space, the ear was very flat and didn't have much definition to it so the next thing to do was create the parts of the ear that stand out.

This was done by grabbing the polygons and vertexes and pushing and pulling them into a position that made the ear look more like an ear, once this was done I turbosmoothed the ear to get a quick view of what it would look like, I then attached the ear to the head to the space I left for it.

I then turbosmoothed the entire head and was pleased with the result for the ear.

Adding the neck and shoulders

For the next part of the model I decided to add the neck and shoulders onto the model continuing on from the back of the head, this was done by grabbing the edges of certain polygons along the back of the head, and following the shape of my neck from the reference planes created a basic shape for my neck and shoulders, I then done the same from the front of the face to create the jugular and top of the chest.

To attach the two parts together, using the create tool added in polygons to create a solid shape.

Next all I had to do was turbosmooth the model to see how it came out and was very happy with the result.