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.

Week one

This is the start of my Virtual Environment’s module, it has two stages; one stage is to build my own face in 3ds max. (Weeks 1 – 5) I will be spline modelling from these tutorials.

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.