Bowl head

After finishing the face area, I needed to start work on building the rest of the head up, this part was relatively easy, I created a sphere and re-sized it to the size on the image planes and then reshaped it to be a bit narrower as the human skull is not a perfect sphere it is sort of oval. After getting the shape right I could re adjust how many poly's it had to match up with the face panel, then I got rid of the sectioned I wouldn't need, such as the bottom part and the front bit where the face is, after getting rid of the polys I didn't need, I was left with a 'C' shape. Now all that was left to do was attach the vertex's together that are separating them and viola! A head ^.^ I did a little reshaping after as it didn't look quiet right, it was still still too spherical. Lastly for this stage I started on the neck simply by doing the method early of pulling out new polys from existing one by holding down the shift key. 

Below I added a turbo smooth modifier just to get an idea of how the rendered version would look, I'm happy with it so far, there's still time for it to go wrong :/

Face progress

 Now Iv finished the main facial area, I went ahead and added a 'symmetry modifier' this basically saves me going through the whole process again of doing the other side of the face and it makes sure its all symmetrical. Another advantage of adding this modifier is that whatever I do to one side of the face it will also happen to the other.

I found when doing the side profile, my measurements were really off, which I find baffling because I used the rulers in photoshop so it should have been spot on. Everything was either to low or too high in correspondence to the front profile, after playing around with it for a while I got it to look right.   

As you can see I made a start on filling the areas I left out in the initial mapping. The nostrils werent too difficult to do, its just getting you topology to match up and making sure they are all four sided polys as anything more or less make awkward shaped to work with and dont render very nicely.

Here I finished the lips were actually more challenging than i initially thought they would be. When working and creating more polys, instead of drawing them all in again separately a nifty time saver is to select 'edges in you 'editable poly' mode and holding down the shift key and pulling out the edge (as if to move it) will create a new poly from that one and you can select many edges at once and do this to. 

Here you will notice a smoother mesh with many more polys that the other image, this is due to a 'turbo smooth' modifier I have applied, this gives me a better idea of a rendered outcome and also if my low poly mesh is attached together properly as any polys that arnt 'welded' together will show gaps in the mesh 

Nice little close up of the overall progress, im quietly confidant at this point, Max is behaving itself....but for how long.........

side profile modelling

Having drawn in all the lines and converted them into polys I can now move on with the side profile and start pulling out the polys from the front image to start giving it shape. I do this by selecting all the polys I have just drawn and converting into an 'editable poly' this means I can now choose different aspects of a poly to edit it by, such as vertex's, which are the corners of a poly (square), edges and faces etc there's lots of other hard to explain things that it does aswell but I couldnt possibly mention them all.

 In the first image you can see where I am pulling out all the polys from the front profile to match up with the side profile. I did this by selecting all the vertical vertex's, pulling them out to match them to the side and them moving on to the next row. Most of the side work is open to judgement as you look at where a vertex is on the front and pull it to where it would realistically be on the side, like the cheek area would rest further back than the nose area would be.

You'll notice that I have missed out the lips and nostril area, this is because they are more complex area and i prefer to do these separately. 

3DS Max....we meet again

Started the tedious process of 3d modelling today, its both therapeutic and enraging at the same time. Max has a tendency (with me at any rate) of picking and choosing when it wants to work. But to start I created two planes (like pieces of paper) and placed the images I drew with the topology onto them so they can be by guidelines, then I used the line tool to draw in all the topology lines for the polys. at this point the side profile doesnt really come onto play, its only when all the polys have been drawn out that I'll need it later.

Bash my head against a wall please

OMG! topology is EVIL! for those of you that do not kow what topology is its a new way of torturing me :/ but really, what it is: before I can import the image on a plane to 3DS Max (which works in polys, which are squares) I need to draw what is essentially a net (mesh) over the top of the front and side profile images I drew that run with the shape of the face. Thus creating a sort of 2d model of what I am to create. Its no difficult though! its like a really elaborate game of tetris, seriously, they all have to be four sided and they all need to floor otherwise it just isnt going to work in the modelling process. The side profile isnt really to be bothered with for this stage because the front image is the foundation for the rest of the head.

This gives you a better idea of how it will look in the modelling process, I most likely will reduce the polys as this will benefit the software as the higher the poly count, the more likely it is to crash.