Sculpting:

It is now time to send the head mesh to Mudbox in order to shape the model in an easier way and add some details that we will use later during the shading stage.

Here, I simply used the "Send To Mudbox" function from Maya that exported my Head model via FBX. First thing to do, is to subdivide the model by hitting the Shift+D keys a couple of times.

At this stage, I am at Level 3 Subdivision and I am not too worried about details, I am simply trying to find a good balance between elegance and personality. I don't have the intention to make a 20 years old "Hot College Chick" but rather a reserved, sultry, mature women with a strong personality.

I am trying to get the general head shape correct and to define the bony and muscular forms. I mainly used the "Grab" and "Wax" brushes with symmetry and turned it off from time to time in order to give more life and realism to the model. I can quickly refine the model using the "Grab" brush while the "Wax" brush allows me to work the surface forms.

After this is done, I can increase the Subdivision level to 5 or 6 and start adding finer skin details on separate layers.

I have made extensive use of Stencils applied to the regular "Sculpt" brush, I relied on face photographs from 3d.sk that I edited in Substance Designer. I took approximately three photos for the cheeks, one for the neck and torso, two for the eyelids and one for the chin.

In Substance Designer, I used the "Highpass" filter after converting the photos to grayscale and plugged them to "HSL" and "Levels" nodes in order to isolate the skin pores that I am going to use in Mudbox for sculpting. In Mudbox, I turned on SSAO and Cavity post process and separated the sculpt layers by areas, I have one layer for the eyelid, one for the chin and so on and so forth...

After having completed the skin details, I went back quickly in Maya and continued to create more NURB Curves for my hair shape. After having converting them to NURB Surfaces and then polyMeshes, I exported the hair shape in Mudbox.

Here I locked the Head mesh and used the "Grab" tool as a grooming tool to style my hair shape.

Now that we have finished our Hi-res model and added most of the details that we wanted, we need to adjust a few things on our final model before going to the shading stage.