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# 36 12-04-2010 , 03:57 AM
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Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 56

Hi Dave

Hi Dave

How are you today?

I spent the weekend doing (or trying to do) UVs of head meshes (namely Chris O Donnell's head mesh). I realized I used the wrong UV mapping - it should be spherical mapping for the head (not cylindrical). Once I used spherical mapping, I got the standard UV head mesh used by everybody.

Thank you again for the Maya<-->ZBrush UV tut. I managed to access it successfully and saved a local copy on my hard disk for future ref :-)

You're right - for the moment I will avoid using Texture Master or Projection Master in ZBrush and try to do most things in Maya and Photoshop except probably the finer head sculpting.

I noticed from all the UV tuts I sent you earlier, most of the UV experts actually built up the head mesh from scratch using polygon modelling with a front and side photo. The tut called Creating Sheikh Zayed (the latest) is pretty good and the results pretty realistic.

The problem I'm having now is I'm not that experienced at poly-modelling and I'm using and existing head mesh which I'm trying to deform to match Chris O Donnell's head dimensions. It would probably be better to try to build a head mesh from scratch and I get to learn polymodelling in the process (chuckle) but I'm trying to save time. I'm doing the deforming in Maya and ZBrush from my weekend work, I just realized that the head mesh must be pretty accurate for the UV texture to fit properly.

I think my head mesh is not that accurate enough and I will be doing more shaping this week by referencing photos of Chris until I can get a good UV. One question to you Dave is how can I set up an Image Plane photo ref in ZBrush as can be done in Maya. Another question is how can I move just the eyes lower (literally) in ZBrush - do I use the Move or Transform brush ? The shaping of the nose is also quite difficult. Its a black man's nose and I'm trying to sharpen the nose as well as reduce the size of the nostrils.

At the same time if I get the color map accurate, I just need to make a grayscale monochrome image of the same graphic to make a bump map. Then I will be adding specular, transparency and occular maps. I will later add hair and eyebrow with Maya Hair or from Visor or from Fur.

I noticed that the once accurate photo of Chris becomes a stretched somewhat blurry UV of the head mesh with some significant loss of quality (pls see screenshots below). I have always observed this in UVs (which is why I tried to use the generic Maya procedural shades initially) and it is preventing CG artists from doing realistic human animation. I dunno..I was probably referring to Beowulf but Avatar is pretty realistic! But that UV from Sheikh Zayed is really pretty sharp and realistic.

I dunno..I'll be putting in more hours to this Chris O Donnell UV of mine.

Dave, about the explosions, and to share with you, its pretty hard to do good photorealistic explosions in Maya unless you move into the realm of Maya Fluids and photorealistic particle shaders. You will also need BlastCode (commercial). Also check out Overburn and the Visor fluid projects.

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