Self Portrait for CGMA Class
polycounter lvl 12
I taught my first class this summer with CGMA for the Character Arts program. The content covered techniques used in both film and games. the hair would have to be re-worked to make it game ready, but the head itself is a realtime asset. I spent the spring putting all of the content together. I decided to do a self portrait as I'd have the ability to shoot and re-shoot reference photography and experiment with things. I did a round of reference photos for modeling and then another round of photos with a cross polarized light setup for texturing purposes.
i covered setting up proper image planes in maya to be able to match the cameras focal length. the form was blocked out there and then it moved over to Mudbox for sculpting and high frequency bump painting. Texture painting was done in mudbox and i used fibermesh for the hair from zbrush.
final meshes were taken into Toolbag 2 for rendering and i post processed it all in photoshop and lightroom
the eyes were done with the same techniques I show in my gumroad tutorial https://gumroad.com/l/IbsQy
here are the final images
i really enjoy higher contrast black and white images so I post processed one
and for those interested, here is a crop of the cross polarized reference I shot for texturing
i covered setting up proper image planes in maya to be able to match the cameras focal length. the form was blocked out there and then it moved over to Mudbox for sculpting and high frequency bump painting. Texture painting was done in mudbox and i used fibermesh for the hair from zbrush.
final meshes were taken into Toolbag 2 for rendering and i post processed it all in photoshop and lightroom
the eyes were done with the same techniques I show in my gumroad tutorial https://gumroad.com/l/IbsQy
here are the final images
i really enjoy higher contrast black and white images so I post processed one
and for those interested, here is a crop of the cross polarized reference I shot for texturing
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equipment used:
Nikon D810 w/ 105mm macro lens
12"x17" linear polarizing film. (sizes larger than this need to be ordered online)
Photoflex XS lightdome. this is a very small softbox, 16''x12'' The reason behind this was that I could only find 12"x17" polarizing film sheets
Nikon sb700 and nikon sb900 for lighting
I went this route because I already had the nikon speelights, so I only had to get the softboxes and the linear polarizing film. ideally it would be much nicer to get more powerful lights with larger softboxes. the setup itself isn't the most professional, but it works. I had to cut out rectangular holes in some posterboard to mount the polarizing film into. I also need to come up with a better solution to mount them to the softboxes, currently, they are just sort of propped up against it. it works, but isn't the best setup.
I had to place the softboxes very close together to get large light sources for more even lighting
the camera is fitted with a circular polarizing filter as well. I had to experiment a bunch to find the best rotation for the filter to cancel out the reflectivity on the skin.
the nikon cameras can communicate with external flash units by firing the on camera flash. I just made sure to add the nikon flash blocker. this keeps the on camera flash from influencing the exposure, but allows it to communicate with the flash heads on the softboxes
and a few images of the softboxes with and without the flash heads