Ah Dave..how incredible God is to hand down our chance meeting in this forum. I really find it astonishing but we're in the same boat! I'm 40 and I'm also doing Maya and 3D graphics as a hobby. I thought you're an employed CG artist. Previously I used Blender 3D. And I'm now only coming back into Photoshop with CS3 (used to do Photoshop 6 way back then with Director 8.0). I'm also looking towards photorealism but not just the face..but everything...but its good to start somewhere. I know ZBrush and Mudbox.

I would like to work together with you to produce some great 3D short B-movies..and share experiences....perhaps by continuing to communicate like this through Simple Maya and also through other forms of communication. My Yahoo Messenger ID is : ezanih@yahoo.com. If you use YM, just send me an invite. I'll post you some of my work soon...just as soon as it moves up one notch on quality :-) . We can also connect our PCs remotely - just download TeamViewer.

By the way, I'm from Malaysia so my next question is : when are you coming to Malaysia for a holiday ? :-))

P.S. >> Your links doesn't work in Simple Maya forum for me to visit your work...could you send me the full URL instead ? Thks

Oh...I finally found out why my black man's eye pupils are too bland. I merely put specular reflection on his eyes (that small white dot or square) but I did not do a full reflection map to cover his whole eye area which is made of reflective material. Once I put that in, the eyes became much more photorealistic! Now I need to do

(1) his eye brows
(2) darken the area around his eyes including lashes
(3) the shaved stubbles on left and right cheeks
(4) his short (almost bald) curly hair - its not long so I might use PaintFX instead of the full Maya Hair which is only realistic for long hair and windy days
(5) create a new shader and texture for his lips
(6) Rig the face with armature (brows, pupils, eyes, mouth n lips
(7) start animating the head with Blendshapes - don't know if my PC can take this :-)

Any comments on the above steps?

Its easier to do everything in PShop and then map the face with UV Texture Editor in Maya plus a bump map but the result lacks photorealism. I dunno about you but I feel using Maya's built-in native materials and shaders and textures such as fast_skin, sss, brownian gives a more photorealistic result than resources coming from an external app such as PShop. What's your opinion on this?

The area I'm quite worried is Maya Muscles coz it's not available up until Maya 2009 and I'm on 2008. However there are muscle workarounds (such as the wrap deformer) which is a bit cumbersome but I'm looking into it.

Hope we can continue to communicate and work together. I really need your advise in order to put that short movie of mine together which meets quality standards :-) and yes, I'm also doing sound....and I'd like to share my work and thoughts with you. Do you use Yahoo Messenger?

Cheers