I started building out the face with a Zbrush primitive, which is very polygonal when starting off and is going to need a lot of work to subdivide and make look like an actual human head.
I did some smoothing and started giving him some actual face shapes but unfortunately he looks a little bit like a goblin.
Afterwards i started tweaking the facial structure, attempting to add face lines and do some things with the eyes as opposed to just having some dented holes in his head and adjusting the blockiness on his neck.
After this i adjusted the eyes giving him eyelids and starting to add in some more facial structure feelings, as at this point it needed some more lines to feel more organic.
After this i got it to a point i liked more, with it having a lot more wrinkles and face creases and somewhat resembling the old man from squid game.
I managed to bring it into Maya and export it, but i’d like to go back at some point and add in some more textures with painting on the face and potentially tweak the brow line / add some facial pores.
I went about using the polypaint tool to then start adding some colour, switching the options on the brush to RGB instead of Zadd, i also made sure to turn on the fast shading in the textures to make sure i was getting the actual colour as opposed to the polyskin texture.
I Started adding colour to the model at this point, trying to use the smoothing tools and using the focal shift to make the paint on the face look somewhat blended together. I also then went about importing some alphas to use as textures on the skin, for the face pores, lips and skin etc.
I Then went about using the UV Master and making some UV’s for my face to be able to put it into Maya, also making a texture map from polypaint, and a displacement map to get the detail of the model when importing it into the scene.
The model imported fine and intact, meaning there were no issues with the mesh, so i went about adding in the displacement map first, turning off quadratic filtering and making sure the colour space was set to RAW for most detail.
However the color balance wasn’t set properly on the displacement shader, as it had no deference between colours and needed to be set with the offset being half the gain. I tweaked it again and accidentally put in an incorrect value and got the complete opposite of the first image that almost kinda looked like an alien.
After fixing this, the model was looking much better.
At this point all that was left was to simply add in the actual colour, and upon doing so, this was the result.
I narrowed down the issue to being that when creating a proper displacement map, i both had saved as a tif file which maya hated, and i also hadn’t set the map to adaptive. However upon trying to fix this, i had ZBrush crash constantly when trying to export. I believe this was due to the number of overall polys, as it was sitting at over 21 million, and even on the lowest subdivision level would still not export. I went about researching ways to get this down using decimation, however potentially due to hardware constraints, even this couldn’t fix the issue, as decimation master would repeatedly crash and even cause hardware issues where half of ZBrush would stop outright with errors of decimation master stopping. However, as i learned the techniques to get there and knew the issues, i decided to use these same exporting techniques for other projects like the deer head i was working on.