Day 243

Back to the book. This chapter was on using 3D scanned data. Above I have the results of a scanned head. You can see there are many problems with it and I am going to have to fix them. The book is a few years old so scanning technology might have changed since then. Problem areas for scanning are hair which is why she's wearing a cap, shiny things like the eyes, undercut areas like the nostrils and ears, and horizontal surfaced like the top of the head and chin (you can see the hole there).

Another problem is that the scan is made up of triangles which is a big no no. It has to be made up of quadrilaterals instead. The first step is to delete the big spikes shooting out of the head in a program like Maya.

Then I can bring that back to Mudbox. Next I add in a default head model which is yellow here. Then I use some sculpting tools to shape the head so it matches the scan as much as possible.

After that, I extract a displacement map of the scanned head. Now I can take that displacement map and place it onto the default head. The result is on the above left. It looks exactly like the scanned head and you can see that all the holes are now closed up. We don't need the scanned head anymore and will work with just the other head. If I turn on the wireframe, you can see that it's made up of quadrilaterals instead of triangles. Then it's just a matter of smoothing things out and sculpting where needed. I probably over smoothed below. I started to work on the ear when I remembered I just sculpted a head so I stopped here.