I've been working on a new eye model. This still needs work on the iris, but I've learned a lot from this little exercise. I've used a NURBS sphere for the eyeball, plus a deformation lattice to shape it. Using modifier objects is a technique I need to explore a lot more. My handling of materials is improving all the time too. This model has an Extended Material Node (woohoo) for the eyeball material, and of course a transparency map to create the cornea. Apart from that, only colour maps so far, not bump or spec. Still, looking pretty good I think.

Meanwhile, I'm working on the eye. There's a free download tutorial (four movies) on modelling a realistic eye from the Gnomon Workshop. I've spent quite a bit there on tutorials in recent times, so it's nice to get a freebie for a change.

My primary reference for this project is Creative Essence: The Face by Ballistic Publishing. However the various authors of that book use Maya, Max, Mental Ray, etc, and it's a bit hard sometimes to work out how to do equivalents in Blender. I am getting there though. I hope to understand 3D enough one day that translating is relatively straightforward, but I ain't there yet.

Round 1

I've decided to call my second round on this project complete. To save the reader scrolling down, I've put my Round 1 and Round 2 images together here for broad comparison. I'll start again from scratch. There are some problems with the mesh that need to be addressed, and I might extend it a bit too. I might work on the eyes first, like I did with round 2. It might be easier to actually model the eyelids that way. I need to be a lot more careful with my texture painting. I think I'll use all my available images this time instead of just a front and side projection. And of course, I need to practise my hair styling skills. I'm expecting version 3 to be a ripper. After that I'll probably look into facial animation, and definitely extending the mesh to a fuller body.

I've picked up a couple of other techniques too. Reading Jeremy Birn's Digital Lighting and Rendering was very useful. He has a very sophisticated approach to 3D lighting. In my current image I've achieved a better highlight in the eyes by moving them to a separate layer, adding a light there that lights only the objects on that layer, and is set for specular light only. Voila, nice specular highlights in the eye without adding to the general lighting anywhere else. The book actually refers to this as Link Lighting, but I figured its implemented via layers in Blender.

Later...

I've added some eye lashes and re-rendered. Lookin' good.

I wasn't totally happy with the lighting in the last image I did, so I've simply set the skin to emit in my latest version rather than using lights. It's a lot closer to the actual photographs.

I had a couple of goes with it, and ended up with something a little better than yesterdays effort. However between saving all the different versions of image files, I ended up forgetting to save the actual blend file, so I've got nothing to show for my efforts. Except experience of course. I feel that I'm getting the hang of it all, and it won't be too long before I've got some pretty good results. I guess then I'll have to thing about hair, and doing some proper eyes. Once that's done, a nearly usable model. Well, a body might be useful, and some clothes. Might get them from somewhere else. I'm pretty happy just working on heads at the moment.

So, I did some basic texture painting of my version 2 mesh. Better result than the first time. The better eyes help too, although some realistic eyes would help even more. I haven't done any bump or spec mapping, and the colours are all wrong. Still, I'm happy with what I've achieved. From here it's just a matter of time.

I'm not sure if this model is a good likeness of Caitlin or not. Texture painting makes so much difference to appearance. Lack of eyebrows, eyelashes, hair, etc makes a big difference to. I find it hard to evaluate form. Overall I like this model, although I'm sure there are a lot of small details I'm not aware of. Anyway, I expect the texture painting and tweaking the mesh to be a fairly interactive process. Guess I'll get better with practice.

Nearing the end of second draft. This one's still not quite right, but I think it's a bit better than the first one. I'll probably spend a bit more time texture painting this too. I'm pretty busy at work at the moment, but should have some time in a couple of weeks to finish this off and maybe have a third go before Christmas.