Modelling My Face - Creating Textures

Creating the texture for the face involves a very different set of skills within Adobe Photoshop. Using the original reference images and copying parts of the face over onto the UVW Unwrap guide rendered in the last section.

I first opened the rendered texture mapping guide in Photoshop and brought the guide through as a mask as seen above.

Using the guide I cut and pasted parts of the face roughly into the right position.

There are a few tools which can help shape the pieces such as the warp and liquefy tools. Warp (seen above) lets you move the pixels of the image around by the pivot points, stretching it where it needs to go. Liquefy works in a similar fashion but uses the cursor to push pixels around.

The next step is to merge the seams of the different peices using the tools available in photoshop. A very useful tool is the patch tool which grabs the texture of the any selected area and applies it to the previously selected area. This makes the different pieces blend almost seamlessly together.

Importing the texture into 3DS Max and applying to the model gives a good representation of how the texture is looking so far. Generally the texture lines up quite well on the model at this stage, some tweaks will be needed though.