The body is generally complete. Now let's move on to the head
with the head I also start with poly cylinders
I create two cylinders and position one cylinder over the eye
and one cylinder over the mouth. and the subdivisions for these cylinders are important.
Want to ensure whatever subdivision number that we choose,
It Will generally match between the two cylinders.
so the one cylinder sits over the eye, the other sources over the mouth
in this case I used 8 sub divisions around the eye
And 12 subdivisions around the mouth
I delete the faces on the sides and back of the cylinders,
So I'm left with only the top cap faces.
I reshape the cap faces to fit the face
I start with a single subdivision and then I can subdivide later. With the eye,
I use the outermost row to create the ocular orbit,
and then the inner row represents the outer edges of the eyeball, i.e. the eyelid
and I want to make sure that I have an
outwards motion with the ocular orbit
and then the eyelid is recessed inwards.
Similarly with the mouth, I have two rows
the inner row becomes the lips,
the outer row is the laugh line. And I want to make sure I have only quads
in this area with the mouth, so I connect straight
up and down from, the top lip to the bottom lip.
This gives us nice quads. I do something similar
With the eye, as well. We get rid of those triangles that are in the center
of the mouth and the eye, and we are left with nice quads.
Now I'm reshaping the face verts to suit my reference.
typically we want reference that is as high resolution as possible
and you want to pay as much attention as possible to matching out the shapes.
in this case I'm just winging it so im not too worried about
my reference's resolution.
now you can see that I reshaped that
Outer row on the mouth area to adjust to the
shape of the laugh lines around the mouth visible in the photo
I'm adding a second row in between the mouth and the laugh line
and this will be the basis for the nose. I take that top face that I just
I take that top face that I just created and extrude it straight OUT.
Then I take that new face and extrude straight UP. That becomes the bridge of the nose.
I'm careful to delete these interior polygons. Next I'll reshape these verts
and I'm just creating a very very basic nose.
I'll be adding detail via a sculpt layer in Mudbox, so I'm not concerned with
trying to represent accurate nose shape
I'm much more concerned with getting topology that will work for animation
which means lots of nice quads.
the real challenge here is the corner of the nose
and how do we connect the eyes to
the mouth and nose area without creating a a bunch of triangles
so I extrude straight down and out from the eye, and we'll see that it merges very nicely
to the bridge of the nose. But now I'm left with what is
obviously a triangle. I can try to extrude out
and when I merge those verts together I see I'm left with that triangle
so extruding straight out from the eye area is not what I want to do
Instead, I want to extrude down,
and I'm basically moving that triangle up
and we'll see it's up by the eye, and I'm gonna leave extra space
in this area, so that gap that sits right there
I'm going to Fill that in, and now get two triangles back to back which is a quad.
I've got my triangles in that region solved,
so the hard part is over. We should have the corner of the nose with the laugh line connected,
and that connection is important: we need a geometry line that agrees with
the laugh line
so that when I start animating I can create shapes like grimaces and smiles.
Now I can extrude out around the mouth
and use those extra faces to define the chin and cheek area.
I'll push in under the mouth and start to define that negative space under the mouth.
I do want to ensure the verts are smoothed out in the region, to make sure
we're getting a nice smooth flow. When I'm happy with the shapes I can extrude outwards
and again I'm focused on the jaw / chin / cheek area.
These verts are being pushed back, and we do want to note
that the face is very flat
on the front of the face, and it's very deep all along the sides.
as I get closer to the edge of the face, I'm pulling my verts
farther and farther back
so these verts I've extruded out, I'm putting those at the outer edge in the face
and we have to pull them back fairly far the side view to get them to line up.
I end up with this shape here,
with a nice group of quads, and the shape of the jaw defined,
right now the shape of the jaw is a little big, so I have to remove some volume from
our face
by pushing a few verts in the cheek and chin area
inwards, towards the center, so they're removing
volume, and I'm smoothing things out.
at this point
the chin and the cheek are relatively done. The eye, the nose, the mouth are in place,
so I can turn my attention to the rest of the head.
I start by extruding upwards
from the top of the eye / forehead area,
and I pull those
verts up in out to meet the hairline.
This will be the outer extent of the forehead. These verts don't come straight up
we push them out a little bit yet fanning
out of those verts. I deal with these extra faces in the center
of the nose in a minute. But first I add another row and
I use that row to push out the forehead, to create some roundness
and again the verts at the edge of the
face are being pushed to the furthest extremes of the
face, to make sure I'm defining the entire face.
I'll tackle the rest of the head with a skull.
Those extra faces in between the nose there
we really don't need those and they will cause problems in the forehead so
I will triangle them off in the middle and then extrude into
the center of the forehead to meet those two points
when I add those verts, I'll move the other verts out of the way a little
just so they're not crowding those new verts
Now I've got a pretty good face mask so I'm ready to move on
to creating the rest of the head shape.
Ok, the head:
we do you start with a sphere for the head. Be careful though -
I turn the sphere on its side so that the poles
are facing horizontally instead of vertically
and I adjust the subdivisions to 12, so that it agrees with my face subdivisions better.
Then I spend time placing it properly.
The head is narrower in the front than in the back, so I grab a few faces
and shrink them in.
The sides of the head are much more FLAT than rounded.
and the back of the head is a bit wider,
so I can grow the back just a little bit
and get rid of the
faces around / overlapping the face
and this will leave me with a pac-man shape.
I can just snap the verts
from the skull object onto the verts of
the face, and we should get pretty nice
match between the two.
Next I drag the faces on the skull almost all the way down to the base
of the chin. Eventually we will fill in that area
with the neck, but for right now I'm simply going to close it off.
now it's time to add yet another cylinder
this one is going to be the ear.
We're a lot more flexible with this one. The ear doesn't need to be very precise
I'll cut the cap off - it's got 8 subdivisions
and in the side view I reshape it to the ear shape
and because I'm not getting a good agreement between my front and my side views
I'll defer to the front view of the ear
for the placement in 3d. I want to tilt the ear
ear so that's closer to the skull at the front of the ear
and tilt out away from the skull at the back of the ear.
It's a pretty simple oval shape, and I'll extrude it straight out towards the head
and that extrusion I will scale FLAT
this is the when I start to connect to the head.
I'll adjust a little bit of the shape here
but I do want to keep the ear totally flat
flat where it meets the
face but the back of the ear
doesn't need to be as flat, so I'm not as concerned
with the shape of the back of the ear as I am with the front.
I'll extrude straight out from the edges and create a flat patch
and these are the verts that I connect to the side of the head.
I will just snap to the points that are there, and in this case I got pretty lucky
the 8 subdivisions on the ear matches the head nicely.
so I can combine those two and merge them together
There's a little problem with the shape under the ear
but we will resolve that when we add the neck.
At this point I've got a face, there's a skull and an ear,
now I'm ready to deal with the neck connection. I do have a neck
on the body, it's already been extruded out, so my focus is on connecting the skull to that neck.
I start by taking the points at the bottom of the skull and
just snapping them very literally to the neck.
I'm not concerned about shape yet, all I want to do
is create a nice set of quads connecting
the head and the skull to the neck. I'll focus on the topology first
and then deal with the shape / anatomy.
We are left with this shape with a very spiky looking chin,
(I'm just merging the verts here to create a single solid mesh)
Next I'll turn my attention to the shape and
add some subdivisions under the chin.
I'm using my Split Polygon / Multi Cut tool here
I simply cut in some extra edges that I can
pull down and out. And looking at the side view reference, we'll see that
the transition from her chin to her neck
is a lot softer and it's also
a lot more downwards facing, whereas
my chin is super super sharp and its pointed
up much too high.
I resolve part of that by connecting the body to the head
and merging those verts between the head and the neck.
Next, I am using side view reference a little bit more literally for placement of the head.
I check the reference in the side view
and I can pull those verts in the jaw and the neck area downwards
to create that nice, soft transition
transition from chin to neck.
Now the head and the body are merged together,
I'll clean up some triangles on the head by just deleting those edges
leaving me with quads.
Now I can start adjusting the shape of the body
as a whole. In this case the neck is too long
so I move the head downwards a little bit
I can see that there are mismatches between my reference
and body mesh, I'll push and pull verts to
correct the shape. The issue I'm running in to now,
is that when I smooth the mesh, we're going to lose volume every time we smooth it.
That makes things look a bit softer looking.
We must model specifically to create the proper shape when it is smoothed.
At this point it's time to Combine the two halves the body.
I'll do that, and now, I need to merge the verts in the center.
A quick way to do that is to just select the
edge rings in the center of the body and scale them
flat against each other, so they become perfectly flat. Now I can convert that
to vert mode, and use my Merge Verts tool.
Now the mesh is basically done. I'll spend the rest of my time
polishing it: for example, the chin is
pushed a little bit too far forward. I use my Soft Selection tool to push that out.
There's a little bit too much of a bump in the cheek, so I flatten that out.
Merge the pants together to create a single mesh,
and then combine everything together and the last change that I'll make is to
the shape of the head,
she looks like a cone head, so I use my Soft Select again to push and pull
pull, creating a more natural skull shape.
And with that we're done! We have a relatively well
topologized base mesh that he is ready for the next step
be it sculpting or texturing
and that's it! Hopefully you found this tutorial helpful,
if you did you can find more like it at my web site,
MethodJ.com