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.
Beard, Eyebrows, and Eyelashes
I will show you how to define a hair system’s density with two methods: vertex groups and texture maps. Then I’ll grow and style the hairs in particle edit mode and with the children hair attributes. Strand materials will also be created and applied to render the follicles as retraceable polygons.
NOTE: The textures used in the video are packed into the blend file, available to Citizens.
Music: “Silence Await” by cdk (http://ccmixter.org/files/cdk/17432)
What can I say,Awesome as usual!
Thanks!
-Angel
is this low poly or high poly
This is a high poly model.
i thought so , thank you for the reply i wanted to use this type of modeling for my game character (which is kinda faceless)
i have bought the cg cookie low poly character series but it doesn’t show how to model a face (pretty awesome series though)
There is a face scultping tutorial on blendercookie!
if you sculpt the face high poly and then use retopology to build a low poly face around it you can bake out the textures and normals from the high poly mesh to the low poly mesh with the selected to active function. That’s pretty much how all game characters are made these days.
How we recognise a low poly and high poly model?
Low poly and high poly are relative terms
If it has alot of vertex’s and relatively high ammount of detail then it is a high poly… Each shape made by the topology of the mode is what you can call a polygon… So the more polygons on the mesh the higher the polycount is… In blenders case the polys would be tris or quads… 3 sided shape = tris 4 side shape = qauds… This is very simple… A lower poly model can be seen with less detail in most cases… This video shows a high poly model this is easily known by viewing the mesh or looking in the top right of the viewport… Do you understand what a high-poly and low-poly model is now?
You can create custom colours for weight painting in user preferences system.
Tick the box that says custom weight paint range you can change it to black and white or what ever colour you like.
This is fantastic news – Thank you! Being blender, I should have assumed it was customizable
You can find all information that you need here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Weight_Paint
Can’t wait to check this out!
Btw: “Realistic Head” is a real good tutorial series which gave me a massive boost of knowlegde!
Thanks, Kent!
Great job!
Is it possible to do this tutoral in cycles?
Not yet. Cycles doesn’t support Sub-surface scatter or hair rendering at the moment. But it should in the nearish future. Here’s a Cycles roadmap from the devs: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2012/01/cycles-roadmap/
agree with Totsch and massive boost it’s right word thx Kent and CG cokkies,I’m now at part 4 and can’t wait to finish it
So happy to get this feedback from you, Totsch, and Nevbms72!
Awesome ! I know what I am doing tonight haha. I don’t get back from work for another 8 hours though
Just an idea . To achieve the baby-white-pore-hair look that only shows up from back light could you use SSS backscatter ?
It would be a nice touch to have that fuzz on the edge of his cheeks and neck or forhead
Great as allways.
Oh wow…
That was the icing on the cake!
Thank you so much!
I’m really glad you enjoyed it! You’re very welcome
For the brow is it possible to use a vertex group slightly larger than the area you want and then reduce it with the texture mask? That way you could use less hairs etc…
Where were YOU when I was recording this?! I haven’t tested but it sounds like a great idea! Good thinking Jamfull
why YouTube player?
if you like to listen to music while you do blender and you like Linkin park. check this out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMiu8t5e2wk&list=FLD_FHopeYH0L4r_cztBwcdQ&index=1&feature=plpp_video
Great series. Helpful for me for the character I am working on now. Looking forward to Part B. Struggling with the hair on my character. Spent most of the day to get something that doesn’t look great, but isn’t horrible.
hi there, just a quick word. the series is great and Kent’s skill and knowledge of blender is aswome, but i just have to say it: beard looks very nice, but brows and lashes guite the opposite, at least to me, fake and unnatural.
sometimes a single detail can ruin the whole effect, and the “mind’s eye” will catch the face without mercy 
first of all i think eyelashes are just too many, particularly for a male character. i might be wrong here, but i remeber reading somewhere that eyelashes, unlike other hair, do not grow back, and i’m sure they definitely don’t go gray, mo matter the age. they are however brighter on the lower lid than the upper, or at least appear that way because most of the time your face is lit from above, and since lower eyelid isn’t hidden uder this skin fold below brows, it gets more light. so hair there should be less dense and darker.
second, eyebrows are too dense as well. i know some people have very “thick”, for the lack of a better word, eyebrows, but here it just doesn’t feel right. and most of the time, eyebrows tend to be more dense closer to the nose, where they also grow sor of straight up, and gradually less dense closer to the sides of the “arch”, where they go more to the side, horizontaly. and in this case, they should be less “puff” and closer to the surface, i think.
if you look at some refference for the ethnical group the character matches, you’ll know what i mean, hopefully
forgive my hectic explanation, but it’s hard to describe without visual examples. again, it’s just how i feel, and for you it might be perfectly ok. just thought it could be improved a bit for the final result. i’ve seen so many portraits ruined by bad eyebrows or eyelashes
anyways, that’s so much for sharing your knowledge. take care and kep it up!
Why are you no longer adding the music background? It was really great in the beginning with the music (except the one with the trumpets, that was annoying).
There’s still music there..where did you see it without music?
The weight from particle tools establishes the actual weight (¿stiffness?) of the hair to be used when dynamics is active, i think. Not sure though.
You beat me to it Jorge! Yeah Kent, the hair weight is how heavy the hair is during animation or how much physical forces affect it like wind and gravity. I would also add that it should be painted before combing, otherwise you’ll never be able to reach the hairs properly because the inherent nature of the weight map is 3 dimensional- maybe that will save a little frustration!:) Anyway awesome tut as usual. Keep em coming. I’m really looking forward to the next one and learning more technique for hair.
Hey guys thanks for the info! Very good to know
Hey Kent, I’m running into a weird issue. If in the modifiers stack I have the particle system above my multi-res, the hair shows up where it should according to the vertex groups, but if I have it below then I have random hair patches showing up where they shouldn’t be. If I keep it above the multi-res modifier though, the hair is sort of floating above the skin, since it’s growing from where the mesh is before taking into account the sculpting. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?
Originally I was going to add tiny hairs to the clothes but got random patches of hair growing inward instead of outward (though all my mesh normals were correct). Sounds like a similar issue..which I couldn’t solve and thus abandoned. Would you mind posting an image of the issue to the “User submitted images” section on this page?
I posted an image trying to show as clearly as possible what I’m seeing. Hope it helps. I’ll keep tweaking it to see if I can’t come up with a solution.
hmm I haven’t encountered that yet..I’m curious to see the blend file. feel free to zip and send it to me here: kenttrammell AT gmail DOT com
Hi,
Amazing series and really helpful! I have a question though; Is it possible to influence the hair length with a weight paint? i.e. where the weight is 0 the length is 0% but where the weight is 1 the length of the hair is 100%. Thanks in advance.
On a side note, I think you might be able to achieve an even more realistic result by studying hair growth of human eyebrows and eyelashes a little more.
Kind regards,
Claus
Thanks for the positive feedback Claus! And yes it’s very possible to control the hair length with weight painting. Paint the weight of the vertex group the way you said and plug it into the length vgroup spot at the bottom of the particle panel.
Please don’t misunderstand my tone here – not passive agressive but genuinely curious (text-only-conversation has gotten me in trouble before lol) – and I certainly do want to achieve more realistic results! Though I just checked in the mirror again and think that I interpreted the hair growth correctly…(also when referencing this: http://www.babble.com/cs/blogs/famecrawler/william-mapother-suri.jpg). What am I doing wrong?
Thank you for your quick response, Kent. I just feel that you’re missing out on some small details.
Regarding the eyebrows: The hairs grow a lot more vertically the closer you get to the middle. And the closer you get to the end, the surface area thins out a little bit. (Although there are a lot more rogue hairs growing laterally upwards, if that makes sense (unless he trimmed them ofcourse))
Regarding the eyelashes: the length of the top eyelash’ hairs shortens as you go towards the edges. And bottom lashes are generally shorter than top lashes. Also, there are usually just a lot more top lash hairs than bottom ones.
By the way, is your particle system casting shadows already or not?
Anyway, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to bring down your work, at all, I’m quite a fan
. These are just “my two cents”.
Kind regards,
Claus
I can see where your notes are coming from. I appreciate the observations! They’re worth more than 2 cents
Indeed, all the hair is casting shadows on the skin in the final composite. Thanks for watching!