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.
Part 5 is about finalizing the skin shader. In this second phase of creating the look an feel of our skin, we’ll generate a texture map for each sub-surface scatter layer: Backscatter, Subdermal, and Epidermal. Then we’ll generate our bump and specular maps. All maps are derived from the texture painted in part 3. After we render the SSS pass in Blender Internal, we’ll render a “specular” pass in Cycles. This is due to the physical inaccuracy of traditional specularity for materials since it’s an approximate reflection of direct light sources only. Rendering true reflections in Cycles, instead of specularity, will yield a more accurate result. Compositing both passes together finishes the skin’s shading quality.
Music: “Hip Hop Etude” by Fourstones (http://ccmixter.org/files/victor/8453)
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.
Trying to steal Kent’s work are we Jonathan?
Doh! I’ve been caught…. Thanks for the keen eyes
It’s fixed now, Kent has his credit back!
It is pure awesomness!
Wow, that is some awesome looking 3D!
Really wonderful work Kent. Thank you.
Looking good so far.
A couple suggestions:
- Turn off the music, it gets annoying after the first 5 min.
- You should have added the Cycles Layer [using a RenderLayer node] in the Compositor instead of using an image
I disagree, the music makes it less slow, maybe insted of repeating it , he should just play a different song.
I like this music and those kind of songs do not distract me at all. It’s probably coincidence but tutorials in ZClassroom are recorded with similar music style ^^
Wow! This is getting as good as I could have hoped for. You’ve finally brought realistically organic texturing home. Between Johnathan’s car shaders tut, a couple of others and now this advanced survey of truly realistic skin, all of my human models no longer have to look plastic! Lol. Thanks Kent. Glad to have you on board here. Your talent is inspiring.
Another great part of your series.
cooooooool thanks man
love your tutorials, can you do a hair tutorial too 
Hair is definitely going to be covered! Particle hair specifically
Really impressed with this series so far especially this latest tutorial, opened my eyes to a whole new aspect of 3D modelling.
One of the things I love about cgcookie is it has introduced so many new ideas and new things to learn.
Cheers
Waw! can’t wait to have a bit time for this serie !!
Thanks!
Thanks everybody for the positive feedback! Very encouraging
will there be a followup with maybe things like hair and etc to finalize the bust
Absolutely! The final end result is a fully-realized portrait: eyes, clothing, hair, and final composition will all be addressed
His eyes are weird…as if he was looking right into my soul. O.O
LOL, joke aside, I’m loving your tutorial. I love the fact that you mixed up Cycles with the internal engine.
They’ve been bugging me too lol. Part 6 is all about the eyes. Thanks for watching!
thats great ! when you’ll upload part 6 , and how many parts lasts?
incredibly inspiring and in-depth! thanks to cg cookie and Kent for sharing this awesome resource!
I grew up learning how to draw by starting with vehicles and architecture then in middle school moved on to people and then my senior high year of school on to modeling people in clay. I’m wanting to do the same with 3d modeling, but with great tutorials like Kent’s I’m being tempted to get sidetracked. The results are amazing.
Currently, I’m learning Blender so I can do story boards for a story I’m working on. The productive side of me knows that I don’t need super detailed models to story board but the artist side of me can’t stop doing more and more tutorials. I’m addicted to cookies… I need help.
I have a small question. How do you rotate the view in blender using the pen from your Wacom tablet? I have a Bamboo pen tablet and tried a few tips, both in sculpt and texture paint mode, but none of them worked. Thanks!
Enable “Emulate 3button Mouse” from User Preferences > Input in Blender. This will allow you to rotate with ALT+LMB.
Thanks Jonathan, I was about to ask the same question!
Thank you very much for the tip…It works just fine.
The background-music is sooo relaxing
where can i get it?
You can grab it from CCmixter.com! (see the description below the vid)
Great Tut! Just a small note, I wasn’t able to get my cycles textures mapped using the Texture Coordinate node. It only worked when I replaced that node with an Attribute node and typed in “UVMap” then connected that into the vector of the Image texture node. Just in case anyone else runs into that.
Does your mesh have multiple UV channels? Image texture nodes will use the first UV channel by default, but if you have multiple then you need the attribute node to define the correct one.
I can’t get rid of a glowing shadow in the lip, and I cannot find the way to fix it. I dont know if you’re still watching this tutorial, but I would like you to give him a look, thanks anyway, your work is amazing. sorry for my English.
This is really good. Thank you for making such tutorial.
I’m trying not to use the cycles render and focusing on Blender render for this moment. I finished video 5. Very good really.
However, if I want to use the Blender Render, how do I add the specular map in between the SSS_trilayer?
Thank you, moving to video 6.
Nice series! Learning so much! I got a problem thou, in the SPEC scene, when I added the specular nodes, once I added the bump map, the texture is a bit offset to the top, and I cant fix it! and the UV Coordinate is connected to the vector input of the bump texture node. Anyone know how to fix that?
The texture offset was wrong by the one in Photoshop… so, fix that! But I can’t render the specular model in Cycles, it renders pure alpha, a whole day lost trying to make it render the face, I cant figure out what I did -.-”
So much spam haha… Ok, I might find the error, is there a limit on images textures size using cycles with the supported GPU? It cancels my render? *sigh
It seems it reaches the limit of memory, so Blender cancels the render, but once I render the image using the CPU, it renders normaly… but still, I want to render with my GPU and I can’t D:
“Cuda error: Out of memory in cuMemAlloc(&device_pointer, size)”