Week 4d - Head and neck

Well, as far as blogging goes this has been quite a busy week. But at the same time, my 3D head is coming along nicely, and I just finished both the back of the head, and at the same time the neck.



Compared to other students' work that I have seen, there isn't really much of a neck, which is mainly because on my reference photos, my t-shirt is covering up the majority of my neck and shoulder area, so there wasn't really much for me to model.

As far as the sides of the head and the neck go, I did that by myself without following the tutorial, partly because the guy who made it skips ahead without bothering to go through that process, but also because I wanted to try and do this part my own way. I'm pleased with the result, but one part I had trouble with was the side of the neck. While matching it with my reference photo, it for some reason became a bit sharp and pointy:



I think this is more to do with the surrounding vertices, but perhaps when this is Turbosmoothed it will look better. Speaking of which, it's time to see how it looks so far, but first I need to attach the two objects together, using the Attach button under Editable Poly.

Now that the two objects are attached, let's Turbosmooth it to see how it looks!



Hmm... oh dear. That's not how we wanted it to look. On an upside, clicking on Symmetry again automatically creates a copy of the back of the head without me needing to adjust any settings to put it in the right place, but now there's a line going around the side of the head and around to the back, clearly defining the two seperate objects.

There is of course, a cause and solution to this problem: looking back at when I was starting to model the face, while the two objects are attached and treated by 3DS Max as a single object, they haven't been welded together yet. So what has to be done now is to undo Turbosmooth, select all the vertices that should be connected, and click on Weld to finally connect them together. Having done that, we'll Turbosmooth it again and...



Much better. Before I get started on the ears, one more thing I need to adjust is my head shape. Let's face it, nobody's head is really as perfectly round and smooth as that, which I noticed after seeing my own profile view for the first time. Using soft selection while moving the vertices around, I started repositiong them so that they would match the shape of my head. Here's how it currently looks:



Before I add any materials to finish my head off, one more important feature that needs to be modeled is the ear...