My 'Final' Model

Although I did not get to the overall completion stage I still managed, in my opinion, to produce a good quality model. Here is my final image of my head, set with a omni light with ray traced shadows to give some depth. I also have included a front on image.






































Looking back on the project I am pleased with what my model looks like at the stage I got to. This is the most complicated project I have ever had to do in 3d and so feel like I cant fault myself too much. I am more confident with the program but obviously still have lots to learn, otherwise I would have been able to get the UVW mapping to work. Looking ahead to the group work for the Museum of Power I am not worried. I would have never thought it possible to even attempt to create my own head and face in a 3d program, so making some machinery does not seem so daunting. I look forward to becoming more familiar with this program as the outcomes of my work always make me feel a sense of accomplishment.

Attempt At Hair

Well I found that trying to add the hair and fur modifier is a bit tricky overall. Particularly once a turbosmooth had been added. I managed to apply hair and style it to a degree of accuracy but on the low poly model.

This is the result:






















The problem I found by adding hair to a turbosmoothed model was when trying to select faces for the hair to grow from. If I were to select the top of the head, for some reason it would also select faces around the bottom of my neck/shoulders. Due to this I decided to stop attempting to apply the modifier as my system simply was not powerful enough to render the areas I was selecting and so led to confusion. If I had a more powerful system able to cope with the demand and a little more research into how to use the hair and fur tool I believe I could model the hair to a relatively good standard.

UVW Mapping

After much playing about with the Unwrap UVW modifier I have decided that I hate it.

I have watched the tutorial videos through several times now, pausing as it goes along to follow the steps yet I still do not seem able to match what he achieves. I managed to get to the point where I had mirrored my UVW for the checkered example. I could not seem to get the points to line or join up.

As much as I hate to admit it, I feel that I am defeated here. I believe that its possible the reason for this apparent dead end could be something to do with my earlier modelling, which shows the importance of the initial topology.

Here is the edit UVW screen I progressed up to:

















And how it looked in the main window:

















Even though I have not managed to apply my skin as the texture to the model, I will attempt to place a generic material to it in an attempt to give it some life. If possible I will attempt to add some hair, though I recognise how complex the modifier can be for such a thing so do not expect wonderous things.

Simple Animation

Well its not much but its something.

I decided to throw together a little animation.

Originally this was going to be of the mouth moving as if it was talking...The reason for this not happening is because it went horribly wrong! So wrong in fact Max actually crashed and refused to do that kind of movement at all when I tried twice more.

So! In the end Max allowed me to animate a simple smile and a blink. I made this by selecting groups of vertices and moving them, whilst using the auto key frame tool so that it would animate the movement stages.

Like I said its not much but its something, enjoy...



Now hopefully I can get this mapping done; otherwise I will remain a very smooth skinned, bald individual for eternity

Eye See You

A relatively simple step you may think!

Well...for the most part yes. The eyes were created using a sphere and adding a custom material. Once I had scaled the eye down to size I positioned it and realised it was not wide enough. However by simply stretching the sphere I would distort the Iris on the image, so I had to go about this another way.

I decided to make the sphere an editable poly and picked certain vertice points to move about whilst affecting the Iris as little as possible. Once I got these points into the corners of the eyes I smoothed off the overall shape by trying to make them appear rounded - this went ok..ish

Obviously I only modelled one eye here and did the sneaky trick of shift+move tool again. This created a copy of the eye exactly to which I just had to position in the other socket.

















Next step I believe is UVW mapping - but before then I may try a little animation

New Neck!

After figuring out what was wrong with my neck, (Silly me leaving the reference plates invisible, so I couldnt judge the thickness needed) I set about fixing my neck.

I used the exact same technique as describe earlier using the shift key+move tool, and welding the vertice points together.

I also decided to show a bit more shoulder (Saucy I know) just to create a more stable looking base for the model.

















The next step I would take would be to add some eyes to my scary eyeless person.

Ear Modelling

This was a complete pain for me...

You can probably see why from previous photos...Yes I was silly and forgot to move my hair from over my ear. This immediately gave me a problem as I could not create a direct topology. However this did not stop me! I knew roughly where the outline of my ear was on the photo guide so started by marking around that. Once I had this line I create the rest of my ear topology primarily by touch. As weird as it sounds it still came out alright. It was definitely a slower process than just being able to look at my ear and draw, but most probably faster than taking another side profile view of myself, adjusting the distortion and finally trying to line up the angles.

The only problem I found with this process was that occasionally I had too few a lines to work with when extruding parts of my ear. This was simply combated by selecting edges in my ear and using the connect tool to split a single face into 2 or 3 faces. This gave me more points to work with and model correctly.

You can see in this image where I have used this technique:

















This was the final outcome of my ear:

1st Attempt at Neck

The neck should have been a relatively simple part of the model to make. After seeing my first attempt it didnt look quite right to me, even though I had physically followed the steps I used for when I created my final neck.

Here is my first attempt:

















To create the neck I selected edges on the polygons leading up to the area it would start. By holding shift and using the move tool I was able to create a copy of the polygon above it and model it to whatever shape and position that I needed it to be.

The trickiest part of this would be under the chin, although I found if I followed the previous lines of the face I would get a rough shape of what I desired. Once the neck was all put into place I had to make sure it was rounded and not jagged in any areas. The final part to this was to make a slight curve off at the bottom to show where the shoulders/collar bone would kick in.

The next step would be to model the ear, whilst i considered how to make my neck look more realistic...

Full Mask Into Head Beginnings...

To create the whole face from half I used the symmetry tool. Although faces generally are not symmetrical this proved to be the best option as it is much faster than drawing topography again for the other side of my face.

Once the symmetry modifier was applied I had to mirror the x axis and flip the image so that I could then position the mask so that it joined up to create a full face.

















The next step from here would be to create the back of the head. The initial process here would be to start with a sphere and cut away segments that are of no use to me. This would include the area around my ear and most lower parts of the sphere. The key part for this to work would be connecting it to the mask. This would mean ensuring I had a similar number of polygons lining up around the forehead area. Once this was done I would then weld the 2 parts together creating one object. After joining up my segments to create the 'full' head it looked like this:

















I could begin modelling my neck next...

Setting up My Mask

After creating the topology I needed to set up my reference plates so that I could trace around the lines which would make the essential structure of what would be my head.

















The plates were set slightly back from the (0,0) point so that when I created the mask it would not intercept. The mask was then created using the line tool; drawing round each polygon and ensuring they joined by enabling the magnet snap tool.

















After creating the 2d version of my mask I would have to see about turning it 3d. This is where the side profile reference plate would come in handy.

I could now pull out my vertices to make the mask 3d. I set the flat mask image at the side of my head and used the side-profile image of myself as a guide to how far certain protrusions are. This gave me a rough draft of my facial structure and would require minor tweaks in placement due to the angle I was working at.






























A problem I discovered with this mask however was that not all my points joined up correctly. This gave the problem of 'slits', I originally thought "Oh I can just hide them by moving points together" but knew this was the lazy option so went about fixing it properly.
















To fix the slit, as seen above, a new polygon was needed to fill the slot. Although this would inevitably be a triangle, since it was near the brink of my nose some pinching may end up being desirable. The mask was selected and the suboption of faces selected as well.















I could then use the create tool to draw around the points that the hole formed from and BAM! a new polygon solving my problem.

The next step will be to turn this half mask into a full mask!

After Neglection Comes Spamming

As is the way with my projects I always get tied up within making the actual model. Then it comes to the point where it all has to be written up.

I will address the points in the order I completed them in, explaining any complications I hit along the way.

Let the write up BEGIN!