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The primary point to this is the 1x1 square. Everything has to fit inside that square when we're done. Once you've finished laying out and adjusting all of the UVs, you have to resize and move everything so that it all fits inside that square. If I left the face as one long object, I would have to leave it at its current size to fit it inside that square simply because of it's width. Now that the entire head is much smaller, I can increase it's size and it'll still fit inside the 1x1 square. I can shrink down the other, less-important areas and fit them around it. This gives me much more texture space for the face than I would have had otherwise.
![]() I ended up deciding to connect the head and the neck since it didn't generate much deformation and it would reduce the number of seams I'd have to deal with when actually texturing. I made sure to leave an open spot available in the map for the eye texture. Since the eyeballs are seperate objects, I have to apply their UVs seperately. There is no feature in any of the current releases of Max and dump a texture from the UVs automatically. There are plugins for it, but I'm not going to assume that any of you have those plug-ins, so I'll just tell you how to do this next step the manual way. Maximize / fullscreen the UV window and zoom into the 1x1 square as close as you can get. Now press the PrintScreen button on your keyboard. This will save a copy of your whole screen into windows clipboard. Go into Photoshop create a new image file and Ctrl+V (paste). You should now see the UV screen you had up just a moment earlier. Using the rectangular marquee selector, Select around the 1x1 Square and Crop the image. Select the Magic Wand tool and go to the top menu where you can adjust the settings for the tool. UNCHECK Anti-aliased, and Contiguous. Now zoom into the picture and click on one of the white lines. It should now select every bit of white in the whole picture. If there is any green, make sure to click on one of those areas as well (hold down Shift while clicking on any additional colors so that it adds to the selection instead of creating a new selection.
![]() Now create a new layer and fill the selection with a dark color (I usually use a dark blue). Delete the layer below (the one with the screen cap of your UV window) We don't need it now. The image should now look something like this:
![]() Click me to view larger version Duplicate the file (Image > Duplicate) and Flatten the image (Layer > Flatten Image). Save it as a .bmp or .jpg and go back to 3ds max. Close the UVW Unwrap window, right-click on the Unwrap UVW modifier in the modifier stack and collapse all. Now press the M button to open the material editor. In the checkerboard texture, click on the button next to diffuse that now has an M in it. The top section is labled Coordinates. Under it is Noise and then Bitmap Parameters. Right after the word Bitmap: it has the location of the checkerboard image. Click on this box and it'll open the file dialog box. Now instead of the checkerboard, find the image you just saved from photoshop. Click oK and Wa-La! Now you're model should look like it has the wireframe applied to it. This shows that whatever you paint onto those areas of the bitmap will appear onto those areas of the actual 3D object. You have successfully laid out the UVs and prepared for making the texture.
![]() Click me to view larger version Okay, so we're about to start actually making the textures. The key to making good textures is using good photo source. Even when you're making an anime character or whatever, you should still use photographs for your textures. There are some amazing texture artists who manage to create beautiful things from scratch, but those people have like... a decade of experience and have amazing painting skillz. If you honestly think you're one of those people, go for it, otherwise, I recommend you get some photographs. One good place to look is here: www.fineart.sk. I'm providing you with a .zip file with a few image I selected as being useful for face texturing. I didn't use all of these, but I used some of them for this tutorial. You can go through them and pick what you want to use.
If you're aiming for a cell-shaded character, then this is not the way to go. Cell shading should not be built into the texture, it'll only look cheap. Find yourself a good cell-shader like Illustrate! or see if you can stand Max's "ink & paint" (it's built-in shader for cell-shading). This tutorial is going to focus on a more realistic style of texturing.
![]() Click me to view larger version I started with this photo of a girl. The nose and lips lined up and fit well from the very start, so it seemed a good candidate. After I'd lined up the key important areas (nose and mouth) I used the polygonal selection tool to select all of the unwanted stuff (the shirt, hair, etc.) and deleted it.
![]() Next I selected a largh area around the eye and copied (Ctrl+C) it. I Pasted (Ctrl+V) it and created a new layer. I moved it to the eye area of the texture map and use Free Transform to scale, distore, and rotate it into position. Free Transform should be under Edit > Free Transform or Ctrl+T. What I'm aiming to get isn't the eye texture itself, but the eyelids and skin around it. I'm actually going to paint over the eye, pupil, etc. in a moment so don't worry about it being in place as much as the eyelid and skin.
![]() Using the eyedropper, I grabed a dark redish-brown from the shadow of the eyelid. On a new layer, I painted over the center of the eye UVs (the part from the inside eye socket) so that I'd cover up any white from the original eye photo.
![]() Use the eraser to soften the edges of the eye skin layer so that it blends better with the face skin layer under it. Use the smudge tool with a very large brush setting and strength around 50-60% to push and pull skin tone to different areas of the face that are still white. The main problem with using the smudge tool is that it smooths out any skin texture and we want the skin texture to remain intact as much as possible. So while this does get the colors and tones where we want them, it destroys the texture so we'll have to come back over it with more source in a moment.
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The 'RubberStamp' tool is actually very useful when doing texture work. It's a good idea to duplicate your image every now and then, delete the UV guide layer, flatten it and save it overtop of the texture you currently have applied to your model. When you go back into max, it should update the texture and you can see the progress of your texturing so far.
![]() Frequently, when I go to make adjustments on a photo layer, I'll actually duplicate that layer and work on the duplicate instead of the original. If whatever I do turns out good, then I'm fine, if I mess up, I can just delete that layer and I still have my orginal to go from again. Duplicating layers is also handy for other things. On this I knew I wanted to be able to keey the eye lid photo layer seperate from the rest of the face for a bit longer, but I also wanted it down there for smudging and using the rubberstamp tool to continue the skin tone around more of the face. So I duplicated the eye area, merged one of them down onto the rest of the skin layer, but left the duplicate seperate and ontop. Now any smudging I do below won't show up since the part I care about is safely duplicated on top.
![]() I often turn the opacity down on my UV reference layer so I can see under it better. I also frequently just turn it off while I'm working on certain areas. At this point I was getting ready to put in an ear, so I got some ear reference that was close enough to the skin tone that I could settle for it. First I just pasted it onto the texture without worry as to where it would go. The skintone match isn't perfect so I'm going to need to do some color adjusting to get it closer before I start to worry about blending things together and placement.
![]() First I opened up the Hue/Sat editor (Image > Adjust > Hue/Saturation) and adjusted the hue slightly to the right (adds more yellow) adjusted saturation up more (adds more color) and lightened it some. I closed that and then opened up Brightness/Contrast (Image > Adjust Brightness/Contrast) and lowered the Brightness some (lowring brightness is not the same as adjusting the lightness with Hue/Sat. If you become comfortable with the differences you'll know better when to use one or the other). And finally I went back into Hue/Sat and added a bit more saturation. At this point I felt that the new photo of the ear and side of face was close enough to the original skin tone that I could work with it.
![]() ![]() Now I was ready to start Free Transform on the image to rotate, move and scale it into place.
![]() Since I didn't just copy the ear, I got the side of the face as well, I can use some of that to crestore the skin texture to the smudged areas from earlier. For the ear I had to do a lot of adjusting to get it to fit on the model correctly. You'll probably have to be switching back and forth between max and photoshop frequently. The quickest way that I've found to resave my texturemap file for max is as follows: I leave the texture.bmp file open in phothsop, minimized. Everytime I want to test to see how my texture looks in max, I turn the uvref layer off in my main .psd file. I make sure I'm currently selecting one of the visible layers, I select all (Ctrl+A) and then I Copy Merged (Edit > Copy Merged |or| Ctrl+Shift+C) This will copy the entire visible image to the clipboard and you can go to your texture.bmp file and just paste the whole thing in. Flatten and save and now you can view your progress in Max.
![]() From this point I just kept smudging and rubberstamping the skin around the head, trying to maintain some consistency and avoiding blotchyness. I grabbed a bit more skin reference from another photo source, did some hue/stat and bright/contrast adjustments to get it to match the skintone and I used it for the neck. I didn't worry too much about the back of the head since I usually cover that up with hair.
![]() I don't honestly see it being all too important a step with this particular model, but I'm going to cover this step because I use it with all my other texture painting. Whenever I want to add in shades or highlights to a texture I NEVER do a direct burn/dodge onto the texture itself. If you do that, you can't smudge, erase, or adjust it without messing up your texture image underneath. So instead I use adjustment layers. Click on whatever layer you have directly underneath your UV reference layer - it doesn't matter what it is, all that matters is that it's 2nd from the top.
Now Click on the adjustment layer button at the bottom of the layers window. Click OK. The way an adjustment layer works is with Black and White. If you look at the layer itself, the little adjustment icon is all white right now. We need it to be black so Go to Image > Adjust > Invert. Now your whole texture looks normal. If you choose the paintbrush tool, you can only paint in greys. White to Black and anything between. If you pick a grey around the middle and paint on the layer, it'll put in about 50% of the hue and lightness changes you set before. Paint with white and it does the full 100% of the adjustments. Every layer underneath the adjustment layer is affected by it, but you can paint, smudge, and mess with this one as much as you want and it will never physically change the laters below it.
![]() I use adjustment layers all the time for painting in cloth wrinkles where there are none, when I'm texturing clothing. I usually have one or two darkening adjustment layers and a brightness layer (I usually use a brightness/contrast adjustment layer when I want a highlight adjustment). There isn't too much need for these sort of things right now, but it can still add some more depth and detail to the image if done properly.
![]() Skin should also be less evenly colored than just pinks and yellows, so you can get some nice effects with skintone if you have an adjustment layer that adds a tinge of blues to it. You can get some very nice varience if done right. Just experiment until you find techniques that you like and are comfortable with. To finish off this texture, throw some dark redish colors where the interior of the mouth and the remaining eye interiors are. Maybe make it a little blotchy if you want. Chances are slim that these areas will be seen so you probably don't have to put much effort into it. The last step is the eyeball itself. Since the eyes are seperate objects, but I want them on the same texture map, I actually put the texture down first, before even mapping the eyeball objects themselves.
![]() Go back into Max and select one of the eyes. Go to the Modifier List, Scroll all the way down and apply the UVW Mapping modifier. If the eye was rotated and you have the circular poll right at the front of the eye like I suggested earlier in the tutorial, then the planer map should be applied properly. Go to wireframe view (F3) to see the mapping gizmo. This is just setting the texture to planer and flattening it from the front. Collapse the stack so that it's just an editable mesh. Open the material editor by pressing "M" and click on the material that you have applied to the rest of the head. Click the "Apply to selected" button we used earlier to apply this map to the eyeball. Now close the material editor, and with the eye still selected, Click on the Modifier List drop-down and go to Unwrap UVW. Click the edit button and you should see something like the image below:
![]() Right now the eye is over the entire map, but we only want it over the small area where the eye actually is on the texture. So select it and scale it down and move it into position. If part of the sphere goes over some of the skin in order to make the pupil large enough, don't worry about it. That part of the eye probably won't be seen anyways. Avoid it if possible though.
![]() This is what my UVs ended up being. We're done with this eye, but we aren't going to collapse the stack yet. There are two buttons under the Edit button. Save and Load. We're going to make use of these now. Click the save button and name the file eye. Now collapse the stack and select the other eye. Press M to open the material editor. Apply the main texture to this eye. Close the material editor and then, Apply a Unwrap UVW modifier to this eye. Click the Load button and open the file you just save for the other eye. Wha-la! You've got the eye textured on this eye too. You may need to click the Edit button and make some little adjustments, but it should be pretty close at this point.
![]() Well, this pretty much finishes up texturing the head. Some small part of me wants to continue the tutorial onto the hair, but I honestly doubt I will... I'll probably make hair for this head, but I don't know if I have time to make a tutorial for it. My goal with this tutorial was to teach people techniques that they can use on a wide variety of things, and not just a tutorial on 'how to make this one specific head this one specific way'. Those tutorials never seem to do people a lot of good. I hope you got something out of this and that it'll help you in your future modeling endeavers. Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, I'd love to hear from you. You can drop by my message board and send me a PM or note me on DeviantArt. I don't post my email on the net because I get spammed too mcuh.
My Message Board is here: http://moshimoshineko.com/bnphpbb/
![]() (Woo... it's kinda creepy - hahaha) |
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