Week Two

This week get got on with making the mesh for the face, the face will be made up from lots of little boxes as I create them using the line tool. As I have already completed the reference plates it is a simple process although a little time consuming. In the next image you can see how I follow the topology of my face.

Once you complete a box you get the option to close the spline which I did, and making sure snap is on and vertices snap selected it is easy to start the next box off from one of the already made vertices. Another example:

Do this for all the boxes and you will create a map of the face all made from these spline’s,

Remember though these will not be connected to each other; to connect them together I selected a spline box and converted it to an editable poly this lets the spline become ripe for attaching all the other spline’s to it, just by clicking the little box next to the attach button and selecting the other lines in the list that pops up.

Now that they are attached the mesh I have created still has some vertices not connected to each other. The next image shows this but is easy to sort out. Just by dragging a box around all the vertices and clicking the box next to weld I can attach all the vertices together, this will of course reduce the number of vertices in our mesh.

Ok next step is to select all the vertices all the way down the middle of the face and using the make planar ‘X’ axis button in the modify vertices panel we can get a perfect line straight down the face, this helps when we symmetry the half of the face.

Now with them still selected we can (using the left view port move them to the tip of the nose and then line up the vertices with the outline of the face.

Press alt and x to make see through mode to make the process easier, anyhow the next thing to do is take the next line of vertices and bring them forward on the left view port and line them up to just before the line of vertices we have just created.

This step is repeated until the whole lot of vertices are created, and it should look something like this.

The next part is to mirror the half of a face to create the other part so we don’t have to go and create the other side using the same process. The modifier I used was a symmetry one; this at least makes an exact copy of the mesh and flips it to any other axis.

With the mesh selected scroll down the list of modifiers and select symmetry. Then in the modifier panel select ‘flip x ‘to sort the modifier out.

As you can see by the image something is horribly wrong because my face does not look symmetrical but the mesh does, this is easily fixed by selecting the mirror layer underneath the symmetry layer as soon as mirror is selected a move gizmo appears and one can pull the mirror over a bit to sort the mesh out. Once fixed it should look like this.

All is looking quite good, remember that if I want to correct something and have that show up on the other side I must edit under the symmetry layer, if for instance I create another modifier on top of the symmetry one and then start modifying that one the mesh will not symmetry the edits. For example I create a mesh smooth modifier then edit the vertices in the mesh smooth on one side of the face I will have to edit the other side too. But if I modify the vertices in editable poly mode right at the bottom of the stack in the modifying panel because the symmetry comes next it will copy what I do.

The last thing to do is add a smooth modifier to the top of the stack, a turbo smooth this complicates the geometry so my choppy low poly count model becomes a smooth high poly one and adds a smooth finish to my model, I also change the colour of the mesh to a skin like one to see what it would look like, and I am quite happy with the results.

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