Advanced 3d Modeling and Texturing with Andrew Klein

First things First, you will need to obtain good source images for your project.
You will need flat even lighting and large format, high quality images. If you decide to download these, there are excellent samples availbe (For fee) on www.3d.sk.
If you are taking your own photos, I recommend daylight on a foggy SF day:

Or set up your own lights in a Studio:

Take MANY photos, from many different angles. For my models, I usually take 20-30 photos
at different bracketed exposures at 300 dpi with a high quality digital camera.

From there you can create your base model:

EDGE-EXTRUSION MODELING METHOD (Head):

This Tutorial from Poly-Face.com also
covers creating a head using an
EDGE-EXTRUSION MODELING METHOD:

These vids from Linh Nguyen also cover Head Modeling:

From there you can UV your model. I suggest UVing in Maya or Headus to produce
minimal UV border edges, My UV layout looks like this:

Once the Model is completed in maya with ALL quads, you can import into Zbrush.

Projection Poly-Painting with Spotlight:

Texturing with your photoreference in Zbrush: Image Planes

Steps before the Projection Master
1. Import your image using the texture library or under the texture palette.
2. Under texture, with your photo selected, choose cropandfill
3. turn off the texture and select your ztool head
4. Draw it out on the canvas and enter edit mode.
5. Under transform-enable the dots display, wireframe so that you can see your photo underneath the head to line it up better.
6. line up the head with the photo.

7. Hit Ctrl-N or Layer-Clear to clear the photo out of the background

8. Divide the model so it isn't very polygon-ized (if it was still low poly).
9. make a new 4k texture, with white as the background color.
10. Enter the projection master. Make sure that Colors and Fade are checked, but nothing else, and hit Drop Now.

Steps in the Projection Master:
1. Enter projection master.
2. Choose flat color material (its the white surface shader).
3. Make sure no texture is in the texture slot.
4. Go to Texture palette--image plane

5. choose your image from the file destination (not like final destination the movie).
6. Hit Ok, and the image plane will be loaded.

10. choose the move tool
11. Turn off the dots display if it was on under the transform palatte.
12. Go to Tool-Geometry and divide the image plane TWICE. This will make sure that there are enough verticies
here to allow you to directly select the image plane's points, and not accidently through the image plane which
could cause accidental rotation of the image.

13. Use the move tool to edit the image on top of the model. Zoom in on the document if needed.

14. When done, pick up from the projection master, and the photo should be applied to your blank texture.

Steps out of the Projection Master:
1. Flip the new texture vertically, and hit texture-export. Save it as a PSD for later
2. make a new clean white texture and start the process again.

You will need to do this same process with each side you project onto. And on each side a new texture will
be created. You need to export each of these textures and combine them in Photoshop. You might get
something like this (4k texture map):

Don't forget to Flip Vertically since Zbrush and Maya view textures differently.

Projection Painting to Texture with Zapplink:

--First up, we want to make sure our Document Size is correct. Zapplink will not work in Zbrush 3.5 if you have stored out a custome document size (which is utter horse-poop, I know). So when you start up Zbrush, you will have a relatively small document. I describe using Zapplink like trying to paint through a screen door with a can of spray paint. If your screen is too small, or your model is too far away, the paint won't apply correctly. Go to the Document Palette once Zbrush has opened, and up your document size to something BIG like 2000 pixols or larger. My numbers here (circled in red) would still be a bit small for use:

There are seveal factors that can contribute to a bad looking Color Map from Zapplink. To fix this, make sure that you have done all of the following:
------------ Take Large Photos (we already talked about this one)
------------ Set a Large Document Size (we just mentioned this as well)
------------ When positioning your model, position it as large on the screen as possible (zoom out your document in 2d to see it all)
------------ Create a Larger sized texture file to hold all of the information. Here I createa 2048 Map using the presets in Tool-UV Map:

---Now I am ready to start texturing. Create a New Texture under Tool-Texture Map:

---Also, I switch to the Pearl Cavity MatCap Material to assure that I don't get confused with any color addition from material into my texture. By choosing a white material such as this one, it makes it easier to see the "pure texture" that I am painting.

Now it's time to use Zapplink:

--Open up Photoshop (if it is not already open) in addition to having Zbrush open

--Position the model as full on the document as possible and zoom out the document in 2d so you can see everything in full on this large document.
--Also, Subdivide the model a few times so that it is no longer faceted. *** if this causes extreme size change in your model (shrinking from smoothing) then you need to reinforce your edges back in Maya by making a "mid-poly stand-in" model.

--Then go to Docuemt-Zapplink and choose Drop Now

--This will send a screenshot what you are working on in Zbrush, over Photoshop. This canvas in Photoshop will have 3 layers:

-----The Zshading layer shows you your material contributions from Zbrush
-----The Zfill layer is your background gradient
-----And Layer 1 is what you will painit onto. If you add new layers (which you will by adding photos) you will have to merge these layers into layer 1 before saving and bringing back to Zbrush)

--Open a Source photo and copy a small section using the Lasso tool. The smaller the better (within reason) since your warp transform tool, which you will use to place this photo onto the model, only has a limited number of points (16) to control with. Thus if you have a smaller section, and you repeat the process more, you will have more points of control over the course of the project.

(image courtesy of www.3d.sk)

--Copy this, and paste it into the Zapplink Canvas

--Place the image, then Transform it to roughly the correct size to match up with what you see in the Zshading layer

--Use Warp Transform to distort this section into place

--If heavy distortion is needed, pull it as far as you can with the warp transform, then use the Liquify filter to make smaller movements. Note, the liquify filter is a destructive tool, so only use it for small nudges.

--Once you have this in place, select a new section to repeat the proces.

-- My advice is that your new selection should overlap slightly with the previous one, that way you can erase any seam lines and avoid having to clone stamp, which always looks bad. Here is an area where I have a seam, but since I have overlap, I can just erase this out:

--Once I have a more completed area, I can merge all of these layers into a single layer... THEN merge that layer into Layer 1 last. Choose "Preserve" when it asks you what to do with the mask:

--Hit save (ctrl-s) in photoshop to save out the canvas. When you return to Zbrush, you should get this dialogue:

--Just choose "Re-enter Zbrush", and your images will apply onto the model and into the texture.

--If you get this dialogue box, just return to Photoshop, hit save again, and come back into Zbrush and it should work:

Projection Painting to Texture with Mudbox:

Completing the Texture:

-- Once you have a texture started from 1 photo angle, you can do one of two things.
-------1: you can save out that texture (Tool-Texture-Clone, then save it from the texture palette on the left). Then you can make a new texture file and start again from a different rotation angle of your model (corresponding to a different source photo). And repeat this for every photo (one unfinished texture for each photo angle). The advantage here is that if your light mis-matches, you have 20 or so flat, unfinished textures that you can combine into one, flat, in photoshop.
-------2: Or you can just keep painting onto the existing texture. But in this case, it may be harder to match up your light sources.

--When done, export your texture by going to Tool-Texture-Clone, which will copy it over to the texture palette on the left, where you can flip it vertically and export it out!

Projection Painting Demo from Paul Fedor

(Part of Essence: The Face)

BACK TO TEACHING HOMEPAGE BACK TO COURSE HOMEPAGE

MAA 4435: Advanced 3d Modeling and Texturing The Purpose of this course is to introduce advance concepts for modeling and rendering through the combination of Maya, Photoshop and Zbrush. Focusing on various pipelines, this course covers concepts such as displacement mapping, normal mapping, Zspheres and their skinning processes, and 2.5 illustration.