The Making of Song Hye Kyo

My name is Max Edwin Wahyudi, and in this page I will show you the making of ‘Song Hye Kyo’ the Korean actress.

THE HEAD

First of all, I started by collecting her pictures for reference, but because the lack of good images of her in the internet I decided to grab the images from one of her movies. Then I used zbrush to start making the face with traditional method. After I think It looked good, I exported the mesh into 3DMax for rendering.

And as I expected, the face likeness was lost in the transition between Zbrush and 3DMax. The reason was because of the perspective distortion and maybe the lightning.

So, The next step was recreating the scene into 3DMax based on the reference pictures.

The scene 1 camera was located that far away because I realized that they’re zooming into the face at the time. The lightning is using photometric lights with FG and GI (Image below).

After that, it’s all about tweaking the model to match the ref pic. I also used couple more views other than those three to ensure the accuracy.

SHADERS AND TEXTURING

I used SSS fast skin shader for the skin. All the textures were painted in Zbrush.

As you can see, the textures are very simple. I wasn’t trying to make a photorealistic picture, instead I was going for the ‘airbrushed photo look’, so I can get away with just using simple and low res textures.

HAIRS

I used Hair&Fur for creating the hairs. For the main Hair I created different layers for every part that I think needs to be seperated. In order to make them renderable using Mental ray, change the hair rendering mode into ‘MR prim’ mode.

As you might know already, The hair is very memory heavy and very slow to render. So, try to limit the hair count under 15000, unless you have a good PC.

THE SMILE

Basically I made the smile by bringing the mesh back to zbrush and start back from the beggining. Aside from using the ref pic, I also looked at my own face to learn about the facial muscle when smiling. After it’s done, I used the morph modifier to create the facial animation.

FINAL RENDER

I posed the head, and added the earrings and clothes, I made them using 3dmax. For the lightning, I used same environment for scene 1, and changed the lightning setting a bit.

And added couple photoshop touch up such as:
– Lens blur with a little bit grain for creating the depth of field
– Chroma Aberration effect by reducing the green channel image size by around 3 pixel.

That’s all,
Thank you for your interest.

REFERENCES OF THE TOPIC

• Interview with Max Edwin Wahyudi (maxedwin)
• This image in CGTalk gallery >>
• Talk about this article on CGFolks forum >>