Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Creating Bump & Specular Maps

To create a bump map for the face you have to open the photoshop file of the UVW map and create a new layer and on this layer make a grey background of "fill" so that you have a background for the bump to go on.

Then select the background layer (UVW map) then make the colouring grey and select "Image / Adjustments / Desaturate" this makes the image become grey and show the highlights of the image.

The next step is to change the colour levels to do this select "Image / Adjustments / Levels" and then move the left and right cursors to the start and end of the histogram so that it shows the image clearer.
The next step is to select "Filter / Other / High Pass" this will make the image become bumped and easier to manipulate like the image below.
Then using the clone tool make sure all of the edges are flat and not bumped as there will be a bumped outline around the image so remove all of these to make a smoother finish when putting it into 3DsMax.

Once you are happy with the image go into 3DsMax and import the image onto the original UVW Map image but place it in the "Map" section and place it into the "Bump Map" area.
This will make the bump map form onto the image when you render it.
The image was very bumped when rendered so I had to setup a Mix so that I could use the Noise tool to make the skin more realistic and not so grainy.
I then turned up the Mix amount and edited the Noise map so that it looked better when rendered.
I then rendered the image and compared it the first bump render and was happy with the difference it still had bumps but looked alot more like skin.

The next step was to create a specular map so that the skin looked a bit more realistic and oily to do this I setup a new layer on the UVW map and started to add lines to the face around the forehead the eyes, nose and mouth once I was happy with the look I selected the "Image / Blur / Gausain Blur" and it created the image below.
I then imported it into 3DsMax and placed it on the UVW Map image and selected the "Map" option and added the image to the "Specular" part and when rendered it looked like this.
I was really happy with the way it looked and then added a Target Spot Light onto the face to give it a more realistic look.

No comments:

Post a Comment