Mesolithic Man

[Alice]

Hi All,

I thought I'd share my first ever attempt at a 3D portrait which was sculpted and textured in Mudbox, finalised in 3ds Max and rendered using Vray - the eyebrows, eyelashes, beard and deerskin were all produced using Hair Farm of course!

I'm an archaeologist and specialise in digital reconstruction (currently finishing up my PhD in interpretive visualisation), I work with a lot of different digital survey techniques like photogrammetry and laser scanning to produce detailed models of existing heritage sites then use 3ds Max and other such software to reconstruct what these sites might have looked like in the past (for example - http://digitaldirtvirtualpasts.wordpres ... kara-brae/. A lot of that work requires modelling up artefacts and people to populate the reconstructions and I've been using my educational version of Hair Farm to help these furry and hairy elements look more realistic! Hair Farm has been great as it's really intuitive to learn and doesn't seem to be as unwieldy as some of the other hair and fur solutions I've tried, most importantly it doesn't slow things down as part of the high poly scenes I often have to work with on various projects!

The portrait was based on a creative interpretation of what a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer may have looked like - the idea for the head dress for example was inspired by the Star Carr skull excavated in Yorkshire (I won't bore you guys with the archaeology but if you're interested I have a more detailed blog post here - http://digitaldirtvirtualpasts.wordpres ... wrangling/.

For my first ever attempt at a close up portrait (still learning to master SSS etc!) I'm pretty happy with the way he turned out, his eyes still look a little odd/creepy but I think that's to do with my amateur Mudbox sculpting skills, I'll get there eventually!

Any constructive criticism or suggestions would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,

Alice

[cem]

Nice work. I especially liked the curls of the beard.