Hello and welcome to this tutorial series on creating a realistic head in Blender 2.6!
This is a complete tutorial series explaining the creation of a realistic human portrait with Blender. The entire process will be covered from base mesh modeling, detail sculpting, texture painting, hair growing and styling, sub-surface scatter shading, and compositing. Some of the more time-consuming tasks will be time-lapses with commentary like modeling, sculpting, and texture painting; the other parts will be mostly real-time.
In part 4 we’ll begin setting up the skin shader. This first phase doesn’t involve the texture painted in part 3. Instead, we’ll use solid colors so we can observe the sub-surface scattering behavior more clearly and establish a solid foundation for the shader as a whole.
Music: “Jazzyk” by dydjej_inja (http://ccmixter.org/files/dydjej_inja/25614)
DISCLAIMER: We cannot redistribute the references used in this tutorial due to the license, but we can use them under Fair Use laws for educational purposes. They’re not available for commercial use, though.
Note: This series has been previously available on Kent’s Vimeo channel but he has kindly permitted us to repost them here in order to reach a greater audience. All parts will be available on Blender Cookie very soon, while part 05 will be available exclusively on Blender Cookie.
Great tutorial Kent! It’s coming along great can’t wait for the next 1.
was I first to comment, I have been watching the tutorial for a while so maybe not?
Thank you !!!
When goes on sale the new DVD?
Yes, when?
WOW, cgcookie never ceases to amaze.!
WOW!!
Really impressed with what I’ve seen so far. I read up on this a few weeks ago and found it hard to grasp. You really have done a good job of explaining the process.
Thanks
thanks so much!
I love the tutorial and mean no disrespect to anyone’s taste in music, but for me the trumpets were super distracting and were competing with the narration!
Sorry about the trumpets :/
Agree, but the tut is still good.
lack realism in the eyes, a constructive criticism
Eye creation is the topic of part 6
Really glad to hear that. Iv’e watched many ‘eye tutorials’, but never really gotten the result i wanted…
Really good tutorial its awesome how you made this
Awesome Tutorial. I tried to follow along with a head mesh I already created, but have no materials. I added the Area Lamp and it renders with a mid-gray color that looks similar to yours. When I add SSS single layer and try to render the face is nearly black with some highlighting. I moved the lamp around but it never looks like yours. Are there some world settings or something I am missing? Thanks again for the tutorial.
So when you check SSS on it turns black?
I think seeing your blend file would make it easy to troubleshoot..feel free to email it to me: kenttrammell AT yahoo DOT com
When I turned SSS on, the light shining on the head appears really faint and turning up the energy helps some. I tried using a spot lamp instead of an Area lamp and that appears to help. I sent you the .blend file so you can look at it. Thanks again for the awesome tutorial.
Oddly I’m unable to access my yahoo mail…I’m waiting on a response/solution from them for now. Once that’s resolved I’ll see what the issue is!
Sorry to leave you hanging Daniel – yahoo has yet to fix the issue. Try sending the .blend file here kenttrammell AT gmail DOT com
hi , thats really cool , its my first time seeing this techniques , so great ! but there is one thing I’m wondering about , why dont you make individual bake map for those scattering maps thats will make rendering time go faster
I don’t think I quite understand the question…what do you mean by baking individual scattering maps?
ahh sorry for that I’ve watched part five and I liked the results , so I think its a good technique, what I meant is using SSS for the main scattering map (just one sss ) and others like regular maps without SSS like spec and normal map , because blender has to calculate sss 3 times and that will cost a lot of time to render (in the other hand my pc specs dont help that much, really low ) although the results I saw deserve it
, thank you Kent
Just thought I’d point out to people that this is kind of a wonky way to get good SSS settings. Ideally you would always leave the SSS scale setting at one value that reflects real world proportions. By default, when scale = 1, Blender assumes that 1 Blender Unit is equal to 1mm for scattering purposes. So if you’ve modeled to real world sizes or changed from Blender Units to Metric, scale should be set to .001 so that 1BU = 1m. If your results aren’t matching with those in the video, it’s probably because your scale is different, as the head in this tutorial is ENORMOUS by real world comparison.
Rather than messing with the scale, all adjustments to the colors and scattering should be done via the RGB radius, color, and texture sliders.
An error of .05 should nearly always result in artifact-free renders.
it’s not a bad idea to habitually build everything to the “1BU = 1m” standard, but it’s certainly not necessary for producing a beautiful image. I suppose it’s just my wonky workflow, but since the SSS scale is available for the user to tweak, I don’t feel guilty about tweaking it.
You’re right, I never have had to change the error percentage value from .05…
If real-world scaling makes your image more beautiful, make it so!
anyone have tips for achieving a black person skin tone with the triple layer method?
I really must say that I’m a fan of your work, it’s really great and outstanding!
Since I’m a total beginner in 3d modelling (I did only one model before this one) I started to following your tutorials, and they are really great.
But, I have a little problem here. I watched your tutorial and made a single layer SSS successfully. Well, maybe not that successfully, because the model looks like he’s made out of jelly, and that’s why I wanna make this 3 layer SSS to work.
The problem is, when I followed your video, on 20:00 minute you made a second material, and named it Subdermal, and when you rendered it, your object appeared to be yellowish with red backscatter.
I can’t make this to work. It just doesn’t show second material, it only works with first one I made. Why it doesn’t work with two or more materials? What did I missed? Thanks
I am downloading this, and I noticed the links to parts 4 and 6 are wrong… 6 points to tutorial 4, 4 points to 6