Week Five

Having almost completed the facial features in the previous week, this week the focus is to build the back of the head, create the neck and add textures such as skin, eyes and if possible, a full head of hair!

Continuing the build of the head involved drawing yet more trace lines on the original side view photograph to use as a guide. The next step was to create a sphere and align this with the face, shaping it where necessary to create a basis for the head. From here, the quad lines of the face and the traced guidelines were used to align the sphere and build back from the face and down to the neck area. As with shaping the face, each quad had to be manipulated and aligned, then the image rendered to see the effect before readjusting to create as smooth a shape as possible.

Building the neck back from the chin was definitely the most technically difficult part of the tutorial for several reasons. The main reason being it was hard to decipher which angle to create the underside of the chin and then as the build of it commenced how to shape it so that it was not full of lines and dips and creases but a smooth, realistic surface.

A lot of time was dedicated to smoothing the contours and surface of the back of the head and neck; it was incredibly difficult to get the alignment of the quads right. As a result, for the majority the head and neck areas are smooth and bump free but small patches are uneven in their texture and their shape is not a true representation of the 2D image.

Texturing the face was fairly simple a plain skin colour was used from the palette provided by 3DS Max. For the eye, two circles were drawn in Adobe Photoshop, the inner made the pupil and therefore was a glossy black colour, and the outer circle made the iris and was a hazel brown colour. This was then imported as a texture into 3DS Max, the glossiness adjusted so the eye shone and the eyes were adjusted so the pupil and iris were in the centre and round to create as true to life an appearance as possible.