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Last year, one of the guys from Sketchfab did a 3D scan of Ton Roosendaal's head and made it publicly available for download after I requested it. It took me a while to finally make use of it but here is Day 1. Tuesday Dec 20, 2016.
The plan is to have this ready as a textured, game ready model sometime next month. (perhaps I'll stop pressuring myself to hurry and I'll take the time to enjoy it.)
Here are the results from Day 2, December 25. The outlines from most of the boolean operations are shown in the following image.
Day 3, December 26, 2016. The model is just about ready for all of the Boolean operations to be applied, some have been already. I think it can use some more miscellaneous mechanical part looking whatchamacallits and thingamabobs.
After that, the Decimation Tool will be used to quickly clean up the mesh and substantially lower the poly count. Manual retopology will be required for some of the more contoured surfaces like the spheres around the shoulder area.
Wednesday, January 04, 2017. The boolean modifiers have all been applied and work
has begun on the materials. The model is still very high poly, it's about 100 000 vertices. Retopo comes next although it may not be necessary for most of the model since there is an OSL script that can bake contoured normals for rough models leaving them look as if they have been carefully built. It's fast and easy, it's just not as nice looking when showing off the wireframe. To reduce the model for that method, mostly all that's needed is the Decimate Modifier to get the geometry count down to about 1/5th of what it is. There's also an OSL script that can do edge highlighting fairly well for a similarly constructed model. I found both of them on the BlenderArtists.org website. https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?329295-Bevel-shader
Tuesdays, January 10, 2017. The technique I'm using for the details and edge beveling is a form of UV-set mesh-modeling combined with displacement rendering of the modeled UV's. The displacement map is then applied to the model as a bump texture using the same UV coordinates. Note to self: Find a better way to explain this. :) The polygon count should be about 3200 for everything seen here once the normal maps are baked. The cylinders currently have Bevel and SubDivision modifiers plus lots of control loops that are slated for removal. The arms themselves have less that 2000 triangles total for both copies.
Here's how things are looking as of January 25, 2017. There's still some work that has to be done before it's game ready. It's still all separate components and the images have to been combined into just a few instead of the current 30 or so that the model uses. After everything is combined the last step will be to add some surface roughness to the model so it looks a little more like real metal.
Feb 17, 2017: I missed a few weeks of updates. Here are some pics of the final results.
This first one is rendered using the Blender Cycles render engine. I ended up using a head model of Ton that I made instead of using the photoscan model that I downloaded from a Sketchfab employee. I wanted this to be completely based on my work even though the photoscan of Ton's head looks much better.
The following three renders are what the model looks like using the Sketchfab real-time online model viewer. Each one is using a different HDR image for the image-based environment lighting.
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