Making of Ella

“Making of Ella” by Ziv Qual
In this tutorial I will cover some of the interesting steps of this project. I will cover modeling and rigging in general, texturing, working with complex hairs, rendering and compositing. I will also share a few tips and tricks as I show the process.

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Modeling and rigging

The first step (as always) was to get a good reference. My friend Ella who is actually a model was kind enough to pose for me to get all the reference. I needed. Setting up good reference. for modeling (and for texturing later on) is an important step to do correctly. It is quite impossible to take a “perfect photo reference.” because the camera will always have a certain perspective distortion. Also, the front and side images can never align perfectly so I did my best to set them up correctly based on elements like the eyes, nose, lips, and ears. for these reasons, these images only served as guidelines while modeling.




Even though this project is about a head portrait, I’ve decided to go all the way and make a full body first to save work for my next projects. To maximize my flexibility for later on, I’ve went ahead and made a quick rig for the model. I’ve used Biped for bones and did a quick skinning (its not perfect but It’s good enough for initial posing, I’ll probably use Zbrush to fix badly deformed areas). I’ve went ahead and created several morph targets to help me find my final expression quickly later on. Since the eyebrows and eyelashes were modeled separately, I found it very frustrating to get them to move correctly with the skin. The only solution that worked well for me was to break them into small groups and attach to.

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