starting this blog

I spend almost the last year finishing my exams at university and doing some jobs. In that time I worked quiet a while with XNA, Microsofts free Game Framework, learning the basics of shader programming and realtime rendering techniques like "Deferred Shading", as well as rigging, sculpting, painting,...

But now I finally started to work on my diploma thesis. My goal is to expore the uncanny valley a little bit, while creating a realistic character. As I did the some scribbles for the character, I noticed that I always start to create more fictitious, than realistic characters. Also it would be fun to develop such a character, it wouldn't suited my "uncanny valley" topic well. I finally decided to create a copy of a real person. Here I have the possibility to take a lot of reference pictures and texture samples and compare the results of real and virtual model.

Now that the first parts of my diploma project take shape, I decided to start this blog. Here are some screenshots of my current progress:

The modeling is almost finished. Only the hair is still a problem, because I am not sure how to solve some shading problems. But I will take care of that later...
The model consists of 12 mesh parts, because of the different shaders. For example the head, the mouth and the arms will get skin shading with a subsurface scattering approximation.

The eyes are split into 3 mesh parts:
- the basic color (white, iris, pupil)
- the reflective outer part including the lens
- a layer with the eyelashes and some shadowing of the edges.

Right now the polycount is at about 13.5k triangles. Adding hair will increase this of course.