Painting an Unwraped a Face

Hi everybody!

I want to paint a face a of a character that I have. I want to know how everyone does this: Photoshop, or a picture of someone, or skin textures and hair textures.

Try Tattoo, it is a very nice program.

YOu mean you want to make a texture for a head model?

@bram32
Thanks, but how do you make it really look like a face? I can't just paint the skin beige and the hair brown :)

@jfk
Yes.
Oops I ment Painting an Unwrapped Face :)

First of all make sure the UV Set is good for a face. You should use cylindrical or spherical UV mapping, then optimize it manually by unfolding things (eg. ears are kind of fiddle.-work)

Then save the UV set as a template texture, with the triangles drawn, like UltimateUnwrap allows to do, or Lithunwrap. You may even have a tool that supports automatic optimized face unwrapping, instead of cyl or spere as basement.

I would then use this UV template texture as one layer of an image in photoshop or the-gimp. During painting works I'd set its transparency to 0.5, so it will shine trough and tell me where to draw.

First I'd try to find the eyes, the nose tip and the mouth. Just some dots. Tattoo may also be very useful for this step! You may also find it by try-and-error. Then I would take a photo and paste, rotate, scale and distort it until the eyes, nose tip and mouth fits the dots I made before.

Further optimations would have to be done. Finally I'd save this (without the UV Triangles) as PNG, JPG or DDS.

This is something I did this way (tho, it was already unwrapped):

Awesome! Thank you so much for your time! I only have one more question: What parts of someone's face did you take?

A front picture of the face. the hair of the back of the head was then improvised. Although you should take care for not to use pictures that are copyright protected, the final result will most likely look very difffrent from the original person due to the shape of the mesh. Like the picture I posted: the guy looks not a single bit like the orignial person.

If you use a front picture, make sure it isn't lit from the left or right side only.

That's what I thought. Thanks again!