tankred opened this issue on Dec 01, 2000 ยท 6 posts
duanemoody posted Sun, 03 December 2000 at 1:01 AM
Your best bet is to look carefully at the Happyworldland and Nod P4Fem texmaps which use celebrity faces -- Salma Hayek, Winona Ryder, etc., and see how the artists merged the photos with the default texmaps. With all due respect to renapd, it isn't rocket science and my first attempt (with a cheesecake model) was pretty successful. The critical thing is to find a full face-on image of your model, which can be problematic. I'd pass on the rubberstamp tool and simply copy the entire face from the .JPG to an open P4Male texmap, but on a separate layer so you can carefully resize and overlay it (changing the upper layer's transparency to 40% helps). Erase as much unnecessary stuff as possible from the upper layer, then Save For Web to export another .JPG file. There is a tutorial on this technique which was written when the P2 man (whose face is smooth and featureless) was all you could get. The author puts a snapshot of himself on the face. The technique is the same. On consideration here is that most people on this forum have avoided mapping photos to Vicky and Michael, concentrating instead on morphing (look for my MaterialGirl morph target here to see what I mean). Creating bump maps involves a little more practice and becoming comfortable with painting greyscale peaks and valleys. Again, I'd be tempted to examine some example files to get an idea how they work. You'd be surprised how many times you can bypass creating bumpmaps altogether. The final word in skin texture modeling is Geoffrey Smith's "Photoshop 5 3D Textures F/X" from Coriolis Press, which will set you back fifty bucks but give you some valuable lessons in organic texturing (including rust, dirt, weathering, alien skin).