Perfect faces

One of the most fascinating things about 3D is that you can bring life to your creations without having divine powers. Obviously, in producing a credible, realistic character, the most difficult task is creating the face, and the reason for this is simple: it’s the part of the body that allows us to communicate. We can sense one another’s feelings at a glance. So any slight error on the part of the artist will instantly be picked up by the audience. 

This sounds obvious when talking about photorealistic digital humans, but it’s also useful when you want to create cartoons or caricatures. The fact that your character has a realistic mouth or eyes will help your audience believe in it. 

In this article, I’ll be exploring some of the techniques used to create these kind of fine details in the image on the right, and explaining how to resolve tricky problem areas of the face. 

The image took about a month to produce with 3ds Max, from the first vertex to the final rendering. The rendering is almost pure, with only an additional slight colour correction filter – no details were added in postproduction. The mesh is built with polygons, including eyelashes and hair, beginning with a single polygon and then only extruding and cutting edges. 

Tools are not so important during the modelling phase, but your mesh topology is. Topology is the way your polygons are arranged, and vital for the two most expressive areas: the mouth and eyes. You have to build your mesh topology around these two parts, because these are the most likely to be animated. If you don’t have correct topology in these areas, your model will not deform properly. 

The final aspect of a convincing digital character is the skin. While I don’t have space to cover the process of setting up materials and textures for realistic skin here, you can find just the thing you need here.