retrieval of facial textures?

thomasp

are there any proven methods to retrieve facial textures from an actor's face with inexpensive equipment like a digital photo/video camera? so far all i found is a tutorial of someone who put his head onto a flatbed scanner, several times. with eyes opened...

needless to say that I'm looking for a better way, preferably one that doesn't require a 3D scanner

Prs-Phil

hmmm I would recommend to use a digicam (if you can get the actor infront of it, but I´m guessing you can get that done)
and take as many pictures as possible. Front, 3/4, side etc. etc.

3 pictures, normal, over and underexposed per view will give you enough good useable material to create a good facetexture of course with tweaking .

For the last head I did with images like that, I projected alot and the workflow went quite smooth.

Eric Chadwick

Hire Daz to paint it instead.

poopinmymouth

Bodypaint with it's projection paint works wonders for stitching photos. I just project each photo to a new layer and then paint away the bits I don't want using masks. I've had to create quite a few assets that way before.

Tulkamir

THe liquify tool in photoshop can be used to do this as well fairly easily. I'd hook ya up with some tutorials, but I only have huge video files from a teacher at school.

thomasp

ok, i'll try out rotating the actor on his chair in front of a mounted camera and try to stitch it all together in 3d paint for a start. next up comes the 3d scanner.

tulkamir, that liquify-tool sounds interesting but i'm on a too prehistoric photoshop version to try it out.

Eric Chadwick

Poops idea is a winner. BP3D is a great tool.

If you're going the rotating chair route, I'd recommend trying to eliminate shadows as much as possible. Try lighting with large diffuse light boxes at as many angles as possible, instead of single spots or just a window. Might help to do a dry run on a coworker first, get the kinks worked out.

Just remembered, also try to shoot from as far away as possible (zoom lens) to minimize parallax distortion. Will help if using the pics as blueprints for the model.