Photoshop CS5 comes with some exciting tools for designers, one of them that stand out is the new Refine Edge tool. It really helps when cutting out an object from a background especially when it involves human hair or any type of fur that is troublesome and can be tricky to achieve a realistic look. With Photoshop CS5 it is now possible to achieve the task very easily. Here are a couple techniques you can use on images especially those those with varied background tones, the results takes just a few mouse clicks. In this tutorial we will be replacing a dull background with a very cool sunset, Check it out!

Resource

sunbathing 2 from Stock.xchng
Sunset from Astoria, Queens from Stock.xchng

Step 1

Open the sunbathing 2 from Stock.xchng, then crop it down to about 24×24 inches, removing the majority of the sky.

Step 2

Use the Quick Selection Tool, to do a rough selection of the girl. Make the brush size about 37 pixels in diameter at 100% hardness. brush over the image of the girl to do the quick selection.

Step 3

Now use the new Refine Edge tools in Photoshop CS5 to help us out. Click on the Refine Edge button.

The first thing you should do is decide which “View Mode” you want to work with, this will all depend on the image you are working on. With this particular image we want to see the outline of the hair, so go ahead and set the View Mode to Black and White, this will give us a nice mask.

Step 4

Set the Edge Detection to Smart Radius, then bump the Radius up to 99.0%

Step 5

Change the View Mode to Black, you will notice that the model has some blue from the sky in her hair and on the edges of her skin.

Step 6

Turn on Decontaminate Colors and set the amount to 68%

Tweak your settings by switching back and forth between view modes. When you are satisfied, set your Output to New Layer With Mask. Then press OK.

You will notice that Photoshop automatically created a new layer with a mask and turned off your original image layer.

Step 7

Now open the Sunset from Astoria, Queens image from Stock.xchng, copy and paste the image below the new Mask Layer (layer with the girl). See final Image below.

Final Image

Conclusion

As you can see the new Refine Edge tool, is a nice addition to Photoshop, it really help to speed up the design process with really great results, it is not a perfect tool for every situation, but it is great to have for those difficult and time consuming projects. Play around with the other options and try experimenting with other objects and see what kind of results you get.

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Get yourself a model that needs some hair.
Render him out using BEST RENDER in the RENDER panel with whatever light/material/shadow settings you need for your scene. Once the scene is rendered go to the LAYERS panel and hit the BAKE button.

Now go over to the TOOL panel and locate the FIBER BRUSH from the popup menu

Now to see how NOT TO DO IT just draw a stroke across the head without adjusting any settings. The result is a solid mass of dense hair that looks out of place.

To change the look of the FIBER brush hair there are a number things we can do. First is to change the Material to FLAT.

Then lower the RGB INTENSITY and the Z INTENSITY a little: experiment to achieve the desired effect. Vary the DRAW size to lengthen the strands as needed. Small DRAW size = short hair. All sorts of effects can be achieved with just these three before we even start to edit the FIBER BRUSH settings. If you are using a graphic tablet you will see that the FIBER brush is pressure sensitive, more pressure, more hair.

Next, go to the TOOL PANEL and take a look at the settings in the FIBRE BRUSH panel. Most of these are self explanatory and if you hold down CTRL whilst hovering over the item ZBrush will tell you what it does anyway:

Armed with the above info you can set about spraying hair onto just about anyone or anything in ZBrush.

Motivated by the ideas and designs from Luis Royo and Boris Vallejo I decided to create a sexy girl with little clothing and weapons. At first I only had to look for references of beautiful girls and choose one interesting and suggestive pose. Once the idea was clear I only need to take a naked model and to pose it. For this I used 3ds max and ZBrush. Later talking to my friend Yolanda we decided to create a character for a novel. I opened the girl model which I did before with few polys to apply a skin, easily to adapt create a simple skeleton, skin it and open it with ZBrush to give more details.

In ZBrush I got a better shape and better overall proportions, as well as the details of wrinkles, fat, bones…and I leave the model perfectly for the camera which I will use for render.

Then in Photoshop I made my first concept based on the model and made the pose that I liked. Few lines and a little volume gave me a clear idea of what should I add in accessories and which composition will do.

She has to be sexy so I thought it was best to add the little clothing and in the line of Luis Rollo and Boris I decided to add weapons, swords, monsters and some strange substance. When I finished the idea I sent it to my friend Cesar Sampedro and he draw several designs from which I choose one of them.

I start modeling the clothes, added the concept in 3ds max as a background and modeled the bikini, the mask, some belts, the eyes and the sword.

Each piece was modeled in 3ds max and after retouched in ZBrush to get more detail from the normal map I extracted a channel “dirty” with the help of crazy bump.

The dirty channel with a lightmap and the occlusion is added to the diffuse. Later I configured a vray material until the specular reflection is achieved that I am looking for.

In the case of gas mask, I modeled it from a redesign that I did in Photoshop. I made a diffuse texture, normal and specular map. For this object I choose to make 4 sub-materials for different types of reflections (high reflection, little reflection, more blurred reflection and nothing).

Software Used :

XSI, 3ds Max, ZBrush & Photoshop.

Introduction :

Hello everyone! I’m Ricardo Jost and I work as a character animator and CG artists. I live in Brazil, where I was born, and I’d like to share the creation process behind my recent personal work: “Cool Guy”.

Inspiration & References :

For my artistic development, I always want to piece together cartoon forms of expression, with realistic aspects that could convince human eyes. An opportunity to do this came when I was modeling a cartoon face with a poly-by-poly method for my course. The face was very narrow with big eyes and without a chin. Then, taking my inspiration from artists like Antropus – especially the work at the beginning of his career – and films like Shrek, I decided to produce a still (Fig.01).

Fig.01

The idea for the still image was to reproduce a photo session of a guy – to create a portrait. The conceptwas that he would be a charismatic nerd, and be very excited about the photo session. It would be two pictures of him in two contrasting moments: in the first moment he doesn’t know that he is being photographed, and in the other he is really posing for the shot.

With this concept in my mind, I looked for some references on the internet and at stock photos. After finding a couple of interesting photos, I decided to do a freckled face with gingery-brown hair (Fig.02).

Fig.02

Modeling / Sculpting :

I started modeling the face in XSI. By the way, in my opinion XSI is a wonderful piece of software for organic modeling because of its practical tools (Fig.03).

Fig.03

The method is used was poly-by-poly. After the symmetrical model was done, I made the shape of him smiling (Fig.04). Next I brought the model into 3ds Max and opened the UV Map there.

Fig.04

In 3ds Max, I modeled the turtle neck sweater. It was basic modeling from a Lathe Modifier and a FFD Modifier applied to fit onto the neck (Fig.05). For the stripes, I used a displacement map that I drew in Photoshop according to the photo texture, and a bump map to make the details of the fabric (Fig.06). A good reference for this process is Viki Yeo’s “Young Girl” Making Of. (Click here to view young girl making of.)

Fig.05

Fig.06

In this step, I made some basic hair just to have an idea of what it would look like and to compose the scene (Fig.07).

Fig.07

With the face’s UVs done, I exported the model as an .obj into ZBrush. There I sculpted details like the wrinkles of the facial expression and skin pores (Fig.08). For this I used many anatomy references from myself and also some photos.

Fig.08