Week4. Creating bitmap Texture

The texturing part was made in Photoshop. It began by opening uvw wireframe image which was created in last tutorial part. The image is going to be used as a guide for creating the head texture. New layer was created and filled with blue color. Then the uv image was copied and pasted to a new layer while in quick mask mode. After exiting the quick mask mode the wireframe lines became selected. Selected lines width were made bigger to 4 pixels by going to select>modify>border. Then the layer mask was added to the layer. The masked layer was turned to regular layer by applying layer mask. This layer is going to be used as a guide to know where different parts of the head texture should be.

Then the reference images of the head were loaded to the photoshop. Using lasso tool I started to select different areas from the reference images such as eyes, nose, forehead, mouth, etc. and copied them to texture file. Each part was moved around, transformed and warped to match the wireframe guide. Once main part of the head was covered I started to match the color of the face copies by changing hue/saturation settings. Then all layers that consist parts of head texture were selected and merged together.

At this point I had a lot of gaps between various parts of the head. The gaps were filled using stamp tool. It is a very handy gadget which lets to sample required area from the image and copy/stamp to the are you want to. After all parts of the head map were covered I started to clean up and fix some parts. I used spot healing brush tool to fill tiny holes which were not covered. Then using patch tool I removed the visible color difference at samples connection points.

For the ear I copied ear part from the reference image. Then using warp tool I managed to transform ear section to match the ear polygons. Then I copied extra texture for parts that are not so visible and cleaned everything up with patch tool.



The bitmap image was loaded to 3d max an applied to the face. At this point I noticed few errors. First was the problem with a symmetry modifier. One of the polygons instead of having original 4 vertices got 5 which gave noticeable gap when texture was on. I tried going back to original editable poly modifier to fix it up but the whole uvw mapping got messed up. The problem was simply solved by applying new editable poly modifier after unwrap uvw modifiers and then selecting unwanted vertex and removing it with vertex remove tool. Second problem occurred with in nostril area. While unwrapping uvw I did not pay attention that there was a seam inside the nostril. The polygons in nostril did not have any uvw mapping. Therefore I applied extra unwrap uvw modifier and selected faces in the nostril. Then I applied planar map, scaled down and moved them to nose area in the uvw coordinates. The color match is not perfect but it is much better than having the whole bitmap image showing up inside the nose.




And render of model with the texture.