Post Five

The Head

The next part of the modelling process is the head and I am going to continue the box modelling technique and model the head from a box, I am adding a few segments to make this process a little bit easier.
The spherify modifier is added to shape the box like a sphere.
Unfortunately this has caused the object to show the edges of the box, the only way to turn this off is to try to add the object to s smoothing group, Smoothing groups are found at the face or polygon sub object level, and only affects the way the object is shaded or rendered it does not affect the shape.
Under the polygon sub object mode select all the polygons of the sphere and add them to smoothing group 1 in the polygon properties roll out section.
The first step is to try to shape the head in the left and front view ports. This is done in vertex mode, and I started to move, scale and rotate them till the basic shape was formed.
With the basic shape complete, I selected all the polygons at the back of the head in the left or top view port and in the ‘edit geometry’ roll out, clicked Hide Selected. This will hide the back section so I do not accidentally click on vertices and move or mess it up.
Now to create some features, In edge sub object mode, I selected edges for the eyes, and used the chamfer tool to create new edges to form the outline of the eyes.
Using the same process as before, select the edge for the nose and chamfer to create the outline of a nose.
And finally the same process is used for the mouth.
Now to move a few vertices around the eye to create an eye socket, I think I scaled the pairs of vertices down to create a nicer shape.
The next part was to depress the eye sockets into the head, so to do this I selected all the polygons that made up the eye, and bevelled them into the head.
All the time I was applying a turbo smooth and switching it on and off, checking how the final image would turn out, this helped my endeavours in the long run. So I did not veer off the route as it were.
Everything is looking great, There were a couple of vertices that I had to use the collapse tool on, these were near the corners of the eye. I do not know what happened but they are all fixed now.
This next image shows me cutting new geometry with the cut tool, this handy tool is found in edge mode roll out, I had to cut the edges to prepare for adding more detail to the nose.
To extend the nose, I selected the new polygons had cut, and added a simple extrude, in the polygon sub object mode
This next image shows the vertices I had been left with, there are far too many, and all getting quite complex, but 3ds max’s handy collapse tool soon sorted this out.
The next simple stage of my models head, is to reshape the nose in the left view port.
I selected all the polygons that make up the lips, and extruded them out, then in vertex mode, tried to reshape the mouth area, and at the corner of the mouth collapsed the vertices until some simple geometry was left.
My skater seems a tad unhappy, maybe he fell over. Further tweaking is required, the lips or mouth area is just not right. I feel this part will be a constant problem area that needs attention.
Here I start to add more geometry, I cut new edges and try to create a new loop around each eye and around the nose, I am trying to make edge loops that make deformation easier, This will ultimately make animation easier.
Constant tweaking and moving or vertices around the mouth and basic shape of nose and my model is somewhat better than it looked before, this is requiring time I do not have.
More tweaking and I am much happier with the result.
Selecting all the polygons I set them to Set ID 1 on the polygon properties roll out. I am selecting the various polygons to color them.
The four polygons that make up the eyes will be set to ID 2.
And the lips were set to ID 3. Then in the material editor, I selected the multi/ sub-object map and replaced the standard map with it. Clicked 3 to set the number of colours and found three colours and added them to the various ID’s. One for the skin tone, white for the eyes and pink for the lips.
To create a better eye, I selected the second colour in the Multi/sub-object material, changed the diffuse to gradient map, changed gradient type to radial and interpolation to solid. Then by dragging and adding new flags picked three new colours to make the eye, it did not show at first and I had to add a UVW map to the polygons that made up the eye and click view align and change the tiling and offset options in the material panel and move the material in the socket. Eventually it looks quite good for how easy the whole process was.
This concludes my low poly head, I will have to load my body and select the same skin tone for both models, and in the next post I will be trying to create some hair for my character, and merging the two files together and finishing my characters modelling so I can get started on the rig for animation.