Another Blender head

There's one stock image tucked away in there, it's the texture for her iris, which I took from this photo [link] by *hyannah77 so many thanks to her for the resource. Although this isn't based on a specific person I used a couple of photos by :devxxsaraiyu: as reference, this [link] and this [link] - many thanks to her too I confess I also looked at Google Images, sorry.

Armed with my new understanding of UV maps, normal maps and node trees I had another crack at a human head. Currently I'm using the somewhat round-the-houses method of: sculpt very rough head from a ball, lay a mesh over it, then edit the mesh into more concrete shapes, then sculpt that, then retopologise a new mesh over it. The sculpting was the easiest and quickest bit of this whole head by a huge margin. There was a lot to figure out in terms of applying the textures and I had massive problems with subdivision artifacts (she's still got one on her right cheek). I now appreciate the importance of quads.

I've spent all morning plucking eyebrows, styling hair and curling lashes. I am no beautician. It also took me several hours yesterday working out how best to texture the skin, and eventually dumped the normal map for just plain displacing the mesh. The bump mapfor the skin is just photoshop noise with a bit of a Gaussian blur. The bumps were overlaid on this after applying blurs (a plain soft edge brush gives a really nasty looking bump), then I speckled pores over the nose cheeks and chin which also were blurred. Made a specularity map from the height map, nothing more complicated than that. Used the height map as a guide for adding pigment to the skin image texture and generated a normal map with the Photoshop NVIDIA plugin. After faffing about with this for hours I just used the height map and a displacement modifier to actually carve into the mesh and deleted the normal map. Must get to grips with that soon though. The hair caused surprisingly few headaches though I admit I took the easier option and abandoned attempts to produce a fine curl in favour of relaxer & straighteners.

Starting to feel like I'm getting the hang of this.