[Figures 10, 11, 12, & 13] These reference images from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, taken by the visual effects art director at Rhythm & Hues, Pauline Ts’o.

When the person who has taken the photographs is working on the project, that is an added bonus. There is even more information about the way something looks that can only be derived from seeing the owl oneself.

Once the reference images have been gathered, they need to be color corrected to be in the same color space. Use specific color information sampled from the owl itself to match the color values in the other images. One way to accomplish this is to use the color eyedropper tool in Photoshop to sample color values of a specific part of the bird, and match those values for the same part of the bird in another image.

When gathering photographic reference, it will be nearly impossible to get a photograph of the bird in the exact pose that will match the rendered images that were created in Figures 6-9. That is part of the challenge. Advanced scanning manipulation skills need to be used to create source images that are more useful.

The next series of steps take the images created in Figures 6-9 and adapt scanned images to fit these rendered images. The intent is to create ideal texture images that match the rendered images from scanned images that do not match the rendered images. The eventual goal is to place the images that are created in the steps that follow directly on the 3D model. Without ideal texture images, the details of the image and the model will not line up.

[Figure 14] (left) The rendered image of the owl face and the scanned image of the owl are shown. [Figure 15] (right) The scanned image is transformed over the face.

1. Open the paint program of your choice. This tutorial will use Photoshop. Bring in the render of the face (refer to Figure 9), and bring in a front face picture of a barn owl. As you can see in Figure 14, the proportions are completely different.

2. Next, get the outer face ring to fit the model. Transform or deform the image until it fits the head outer size (Figure 15).