Head Notes

I recently collaborated with a photo-retoucher on a small project I did in my spare time.  My role was to create 3d elements that were to be composited into a high resolution photograph by the retoucher.  I had to create a human head out of bank notes.  It was tricky in the beginning to figure out how I would do it without it taking too long or being very tedious.  I began by making a proxy head model that would fit over the head in the original picture.  Then I created a single bank note that I UV’d, duplicated many times and then fit it to the head model using the sculpt deformer.  Below is the final result. Photo-retouching was done by Miguel Navarro at theImageFoundation.eu.

Here is a look at the proxy head and the bank notes. There are 82 bank notes in total, each was separately placed one by one. It did not take me as long as it sounds it would have haha.

I was given a diagram showing the lighting setup in the original photograph which I replicated inside Maya using a few spot lights and final gather. Below is a close up shot of the final render.