Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci played Persephone in the Matrix trilogy parts 2 and 3 she's an older actress in her 40's. So her photo's tend to be a higher contrast with some Vaseline on ye'ol camera lens. An effect that I tried to simulate with this lighting. From the thumbnail she should look younger but when you blow up the picture you should be able to see some of her age reflected.

This head was a pure a sculpt done in zbrush, meaning I had never lined up any photos to model just eye balled everything, which was more of an exercise in modeling. The skin was also done purely hand panted using no photos.

I've taken this one about as far as it will go I think, there are always things that you want to tweak and make better, but I'm going to put this one in the done pile.

okay, maybe I ninja'd an update...

Nailing down the lighitng

So this will be pretty much the lighting I'm going with. However I had made some changes to the geo and turned off a fill light by accident, which really impacts the lower half of her face. So I will update it tomorrow with some tweaks. I think I may have hit a weird switch or something because the render times have shot through the roof.

Skin, you can tweak skin forever, so many variables and image maps to construct it. Female skin is so much softer too. The skin for Olmos was easier I think (however with what I learned from this skin I wouldn't mind going back and fixing his up some).

And I scrapped the hair yet again

So I just wasn't feeling the hair at all, so I scrapped it all and just used Maya hair.

She's pretty much done now, I'm sure I'll be tweaking the hair more, and the skin shader, and the lighting. And the lips I would like them a little glossier.

So I have two lighting setups, really the only difference is the back-light from the camera left. MSN/Comment on which you think is better :).

Pretty close to where I want her

So I had some issues with Maya crashing when rendering out my scene, it had to do with the displacement node creating a new render engine and then hair crashing maya out because there was a new render engine.

So I have my model close to done, most likely some modeling tweaks here and there but no major reworks. Some skin shader tweaks also, tho I think you can tweak skin forever and day. I'm happy with how the skin turned out as it was my first hand painted skin. So right now it's my low bar and high bar I guess.

Tweaks I'm going to hit, is the eyebrows, the nose nostril area and the bridge area. The normal map may be reading to harshly right now, making some things look a little too sharp, which is the reverse of the problem I was having before where none of the details were really showing up that well.

Any guesses to who she is? Send me an MSN or post a comment :).

Not much for the long hair

So here is the current state of the head, eyebrows and eyelashes have thickened up. I'm trying to age her up a little also. I've added some new details to the texture.


I'm definitely no hairdresser... Bellow is several hair styles I had gone through and rejected. With long hair I'm finding it's freaking tricky to control all the strands of hair, and most tutorial methods I've seen are shown with really short hair...

So this method was a fail because the hair just didn't seam grounded to the head, the weird kinking on the her right side was an easy fix, but the feel of the hair was wrong. So I scrapped it.


Hair Helmet anyone?


Again these hairstyles are the rejects and I'm just posting my process and problems I'm facing...

Eyelashes and Eyebrows

Added some eyelashes and eyebrows.

The eyelashes on the right eye could use some more tuning, maybe clump both a little more and make them longer.

The eyebrows are close to where I would like them, I can't seam to find where to adjust the translucency on the hair of the eyebrow tho, which I think would help it.

I have a feeling that the eyebrows and eyelashes are going to be constantly tweaked...

Skin Deep

So I've added some spec maps to the face, and cleaned up some issues I didn't like in the texture. The color on the ears is still a little off, it's the back scatter map I think. I have the feeling I'm constantly going to adjust the 6 texture maps that make up the skin shader until this project is done. I'm liking the overall look however.

I'm hoping to add some eyelashes and eyebrows next. Eye liner looked weird without eyelashes so that's not in the texture yet.

I don't like Ed's skin shader very much, think I may go back and adjust after I'm done this project.

Another new one

Just started this head the other night. I just started the skin about 4 hours ago, I think it's coming along, little yellow on top of the forehead. There is pretty much zero spec on face right now, because it's a WIP and I still have to create those maps. The skin so far is entirely hand painted.

Right now there is Zero poor detail and very little other details like moles, wrinkles etc. Also she's not wearing any makeup.

Tomorrow I will create some spec maps, fine tune the texture, fix some modeling things that are bugging me, and add in details.

Talk about a hairy situation...

So I had a good weekend, my little girl came down for a visit on Friday for the weekend, always a good time when the brat is about it :).

Talk about a hairy situation. So this girls hair I'm finding waaaay tougher than Olmos's hair. Right now I'm using maya hair to do this and it's giving me mixed results all over the place. Basically I set up a simulation to get the hair falling on the head right, but some curves are fighting me tooth and nail, like the bludge on the left side of her head (camera right). The top of her right side is also bulging up too much it should be flatter.

The bottom of her hair I haven't really worked on yet, it's going to require a new simulation as thickness and color that's required I can't really get with one Maya hair setup.


I'm finding it hard to find a good tutorial on making hair, I watched one by digital tutors but it was more about using dynamics and not actually creating nice hair. The 10ish minute example on creating a actual head of hair for a model was poorly done and did not look good at all (the picture of the redhead on the web page isn't in the video). That being said it did have some new ideas in it, and I did learn somethings just not what I really wanted to learn, if you have a library around sign it out.

So in short still lots of work to do on the hair... Never liked hair really, takes me months to get a hair cut.

Well Momma didn't raise no hair dresser...

So did some revisions to the girl head and started a different approach on hair. Basically I started with nurbs planes and sculpted out hair cards, then I extracted the curves and populated the entire head with hair. This method was a lot faster than Ed's hair where I had individually placed each hair clumb and then shaped the key strands.

However will this be a better technique? Right now this image is just a straight up raw extraction from the planes, and we see two things;


1. The hair needs a lot of work and
2. I am noooooo hairdresser.

I will play with dynamics and see if I can get the hair to settle on the head and fall along her neck better, if that doesn't work, well... I'm in for a heap of work.

Again this is a WIP (Work in Progress) Image and in no way represents the final head and hair.

Not a 2am - 3am Post

Man I post a lot late a night, any who this is where my head is at...


Will start on the hair soon, gonna switch back to Edward and fix his hair up, and give him eyebrows. I don't know any artist who likes doing hair, tedious and hard :p.

Overall she's coming along, I think I could stand to make her mouth a little smaller, and up around her eyelashes it's kinda smudgy.

Seek the shader!

Set up the skin shader, I'm using a lot more maps this time and found some errors in the Olmos shader, hehe. The eyes aren't fitting atm, so I'm going to have to fix that... The modeling isn't finished at all, I just worked on the shader pretty much today, defined the neck area better.

Textured cleaned, guess I should do the same to the house...

So I cleaned up the texture, touched up some modeling. Right now the texture and model is pretty symmetrical so I'll add some asymmetry tomorrow or the next day. This is still being rendered in zbrush so that kinda blows out all the detail in the texture atm. I'm also going to have to add in the fine details over the next bit too, flesh out the neck and chest area as it's pretty flat.

Windows 7 networking is easier?

Bah, spent most of my time today trying to get my notebook and desktop to talk to each other. They still don't really, I've narrowed it down as either windows 7 networking sucks or Bitdefender my firewall does... Anyways.

So I started with the texutre on her face, I can't find any hires images of who I'm doing, so I had to lay down a highres skin texture from a different female model all together. As you can see stuff isn't lining up, like the nostrils, eyebrows, eyes, just the mouth so far. And the texture has a bunch of light patches and streaks and projection errors. But I'm posting because this is a wip, so :p.

Don't the grey eyes look eerie? You can have a lot of weirdness on the human head, but mess with the eyes and it all goes to pot :).

Other work

Just started modelling a new head, a girl... way different than Ed there :).