Week 3 - So far, so good

In my last entry, I covered how I began with the modelling process by redrawing the Quads as Grid lines in 3DS Max, and pulling them forward to line up with the topology lines on the profile view of my head: that process is now complete, although at one stage I needed to start all over again because I got to a stage where I came back later and got completely stuck.

In order to get my head around the problem (oh, ha, ha), what I did instead, rather than following exactly as the tutorial instructed, was pull every single one of the vertices forward, and then pulled them forwards and pushed them back as I needed, and I'm very pleased with the result. Here's how it looks:



I made sure that it matched my facial features perfectly: rather than relying only on my photos for reference, I needed to at times feel around my own face to see where and how exactly the quads needed to be positioned. I briefly applied Turbosmooth to see how the final version will eventually look, and I was even more pleased with that result because it removed any unwanted bumps around the sides of my face, doing the hard work for me (Note that the Turbosmooth needs to be undone, otherwise it will make modelling more complicated).

So the next thing that needed to be done was to make the other half of the face. Thankfully, because 3DS Max is able to clone objects, it saves me the trouble of essentially modelling the face again. What I did next, following the tutorial, was click on the Symmetry modifier, adjust some settings here and there, pull the cloned half of the face one way, and here is the result:



It looks OK to me, but as you can see in the screengrab, one of the cheeks looks a bit bumpy, and the middle of the nose looks very thin: as I mentioned earlier, the Turbosmooth modifier, when I eventually need to use it near the end, will fix the bumpy cheeks. It will not fix the nose, so I just needed to make some minor adjustments, and...



Done! Next thing I need to do is to start working on the other facial features like the nostrils and lips, as well as the ears and... well, the rest of the head.