http://cg-india.com/tutorials/3dsmax_tutorials_organic_modeling.html
Stage two (Week 5 – 12) is to investigate The Museum of Power based at Langford, Maldon, identify a steam engine or tool to model and animate to show the general public how it works/would have worked and what it was originally used for.
So I better just get started, the tutorials were really easy to work through, I just set them up on one of my pc’s and worked on the other, doing this way was so much easier then any other way so I just stuck with it. They are very well made tutorials and he takes you through the whole process and I would like to recommend them to anyone who is of need of a technique to model the face. It has shown me ways of doing things I would never have considered and taught me skills to use in any further projects.
Step one was to take some photo’s of my face and the top of my shoulders, I rented a camera from the media centre in the university and with the help of one of my friends, took some pictures all at the same level, I was sat in a chair while my friend set the camera up with a tripod and shot the whole event, they came out rather good.
In Photoshop I opened up the images, and by using the lens correction modifier under the distortion filter I was able to correctly align the images horizontally by using the tool that lets you draw a line to level the image, based on the eyes lining up or bottom of ears etc.
Once I was happy with both images, I had to create a topology; using a new layer I created blue lines with the brush tool, to highlight all the natural folds of my face, all the creases and wrinkles etc. This took me a lot of time, I can not draw with a mouse and so bought a tablet and tried the same task with that, such a lot easier. The following picture shows my finished result; it is not like the one in the tutorial, he had lines where I did not, and because of this I decided to just draw everything in, I found it was easier to do this then to try and draw just a few lines.
The quads were required next, a quad is a four sided shapes that will form the surface of the mesh of our face in 3ds max. I had to break my face up into these. This will let max make the mesh more easily and we were warned about the dangers of the pinching effect of a triangle or a five sided shape. I admit in the later stages of these tutorials I did find out about these problems having a 5 sided shape in the middle of a lot of quads takes some puzzle solving to try and sort it out. So doing it here correctly is a definite time saver. I know that my topology looks a bit funny, well it is my first time attempting it and I wondered how many times the man in the tutorial has done this process and how many years has the guy practised this technique and then I felt a little more satisfied with my work.
With the topology complete I enter 3ds max 9 and start by creating a plane with one height segment and one length segment. I had to then assign a material to it, the image I had created in Photoshop, by clicking the little box next to the diffuse colour, I am able to select bitmap from the next window and import the file. I select the Photoshop file .psd file. Max recognises the file and uses the image with the layers already created, it even gives an option to flatten the layers in the image, and well I had already done this so I just carried on.
This loaded the image I had created onto the plane in my viewport, although it was squished and centred wrongly. To correct this I had to select the UVW map on the modifier panel; to align the image better.
On the modifier panel next to the UVW map layer I had to click the plus symbol and select the gizmo layer; this alloys me to move the picture on the plane and by using the plane’s modifier panel one can change the properties of the planes dimensions to fill the picture perfectly.
Once all was correct I had to change the pictures ‘self illumination’ in the material editor; this lets us view the picture at all angles in the viewport without giving us any shadows. Next another plane had to be created in exactly the same way but this time with the side of my face as a reference, all a piece of cake as I had just created one I just shift rotated it 90 degrees, by cloning it, all the layers will be the same and to move the picture on the plane I repeated the steps going to the UVW map plus symbol and clicking on the gizmo layer. Moved the image to a required spot and then exited the layer hierarchy the same way changed the planes properties and then moved the plane to the required spot. Lastly they were frozen in place so I do not modify or move them by accident; this was done via the right click context menu while the reference planes are selected.
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