Realistic Head Project

Update 4 (current):

Update 3 (old) :

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Original Post (old):

This was my first attempt at creating a realistic head. His eyebrows are still missing since I’m facing some performance issues and the high frequency detail is still a work in progress.
It’s all vertex painted directly in the blender viewport, including the eyes.

I also tried my hand at SSS which turned out ok, I think.

I will try to refine it over the week after either retopologizing the whole thing or upgrading my rig (which is probably long overdue :wink: )

What do you think of it so far?

Ps: Sorry about the low resolution. I’ll upload a larger image by the end of the week.

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Ok so after a bit of tinkering I had to recognize that without retopologizing the mesh I couldn’t continue working on it. That’s the limitation of not only my rig but also dynamic topology. I retopologized and refined it after adding a multi-res modifier to it. This is the result thus far.

Ps: I wish the pores were more visible, but I guess that will come out more as I play around with the shader and start texturing.

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Lovely work!!! :smiley: nice, clean work!

I love it!

Lovely work!!! :smiley: nice, clean work!

I love it!

Thanks for the encouragement! Glad you like it. :slight_smile:

I’ll try to upload an update during the week or on the weekend at the latest.

looking really good so far. can’t wait to see how it turns out

Thanks. There will be an update soon (today or tomorrow).
Im currently working on the skin textures and will then move on to the eyes. :slight_smile:

Wow, I totally love the sculpt, especially the eyes and the mouth. The non-colored image itself i a great reference for sculpting!! Great work! :cool:

Thanks, that’s quite the compliment.! :slight_smile:

As for the project: I planned to update it yesterday, but that didn’t work out because the skin painting ended up taking longer than expected (skin is tricky business, as it turns out :wink: ) and I still have yet to finish it. I might post a new render to show you how much it’s progressed so far, later today.

Update 2:


So I finally managed to get most of the work on the skin done, alltough I’m still working on the tones in part. The materials are handpainted in Gimp, except for the eyes, where I used a texture for the base to color over and make some alterations to . Usually I just sculpt and leave the mesh untextured so this is fairly new territory for me and progress accordingly slow. I’ll try to get some more detail into it and work on the displacement map (the forehead). The eyes are also still a work in progress and I’m hoping to get some more realism into them.

I haven’t yet added an environment map to the lighting setup and will have to look for a few suitable ones.

The plan is to put finishing touches on the skin and then move on to the particle system for the eyebrows (and possibly some stubble for the beard) on the weekend. If time allows it, I’ll put in some compositing work then, too.

Would (again :slight_smile: ) appreciate some feedback!

This is getting better every day! :smiley: is it BI or cycles? Also, did you sculpt in multires of dynamic topology?

Thanks for the comment! (we’re almost old aquaintances by now, hm? :wink: )
It’s all rendered in Cycles with 7500 samples. Took approxomately 15 min to render out.
I used dynamic topology at the beginning to sculpt out the forms and get as much detail in it as I possibly could. After that I retopologized the whole mesh and added a multires modifier to it. The mesh sits at about 2.9 million polys and that’s also pretty much the limit of my current rig.

No problem! (Of course :slight_smile: )
That’s great! Will you add hair? Kent Trammell explains very well how to make realistic hair in his portrait series!

This looks realistic looking forward to seeing more of this

I might give him some hair, depending on how realistic it looks in the end. Otherwise I’ll give him a hat or some other kind of headwear.
I watched part of Kent’s tutorial series back when it was originally released (he makes excellent tutorials) but I should definitely have another look at it, especially the part about hair. Good suggestion!

Thank you!

Yeah, I am working on a realistic portrait (I might post a whip thread or something tomorrow) and those tutorials have really helped! :slight_smile:

Update 3(current):


I thought I’d post a little update.
Sadly I didn’t have all that much time to continue my work on this project this week, so his eyebrows are still missing :o. But what I did manage to do, is work on the shaders and tweak the lighting a little. I also boosted the bump to some degree.

What do you think of the changes? I have to admit I’m quite proud of this project, since I usually don’t take things this far, but it was definitely very educational.

Ps: I’ll try to work on it some more towards the end of the week and hopefully finally manage to wrap my head around the hair shaders and particle systems. I also plan to give him some clothing, but we’ll see if I get around to that.

Edit: The image is still a bit grainy (sorry about that, currently on my old computer) and I will increase the samples for the final composition.

Nice update! The shine on the skin looks much more real, and the overall skin feel is excellent ! You know, this is starting to look very professional! :slight_smile:

Really like the work ur doing.

Hope I can do this too one day.
Keep up the good work.

Thanks Guys, glad you like it :slight_smile:

Thanks, it’s not quite there yet, unfortunately. But there are still a few stages ahead including compositing, so I’m sure there’s still a thing or two for me to improve on this.

How’s your own WIP thread coming along?

Thank you! Glad you like it. :slight_smile:
I’m sure you’ll get there eventually. I had quite a few failed attempts before this one (sculpting faces is tough, after all) and still have much to learn.