A New Character

It's been a while since I made a post so I decided to make one today. Here's a new character I just started working on not too long ago. The head model was done in Max, upresed in Zbrush and taken into Maya to do the hair. I've included my shader network the head is currently using to render correctly in Mental Ray. I decided to unwrap just half the head and flip the UV's for the other half and have it overlay itself. Normally there are problems when trying to use this method to render, but there are ways around it. The easiest method is what I did in this setup. I'll have to change it when I get around finalizing it. Basically all you need to do is take the red(X) and Green(Y) channels and have them inverted for the second half of the face. Real time renderers do not require this, but being that I'm using Mental Ray, that was a requirement. What I just did here was inverted the red and green channels in photoshop and saved out a seperate normal map just for it. I'll eventually change it to a node based system while only using one normal map to save space. To avoid having any seam issues from using 2 misss fast skin shaders, I made them both share the same light map and node setup to create the first half of the face. If this is not done, there will be an apparent seam in the middle of the face. I unwrapped the face this way to avoid any stretching textures where the ears will be at.

I started the hair out in a similar way I did with the previous character head, but I've just gotten much faster at creating these curves. haha.. I should have the whole head filled with hair curves by the end of the day, but here is a preview of what I have in the viewport so far along with my UV setup.

*Edit
What you are seeing right now are nurbs hair on her head. I'll rebuild all the nurbs surfaces tomorrow and then duplicate all the surface curves to then apply hair systems to all of it. The reason I lofted the curves into a surface is because it is much easier to create the interpolated curves inbetween the two main curves using surface isoparms. Rebuilding the surface will allow me to tell it how many spans I want between each major curve which then allows me to simply select the isoparms and duplicate those surface curves.