I'm James Taylor, let's model this head in Maya. We'll focus on the face area,
most and most notably the eye region and the mouth region where the most animation happens.
And to do that, we'll define our topology along these lines.
As I did with the body, I'm modeling on top of Image Planes.
I've lined them up using my guidelines. The big difference is, we need these to match up as
closely as possible. So we really have to take time to nitpick.
You'll see that already have a place holder head I created, based on the previous reference. This will make matching the scale between my old
reference and my new reference much easier. So I import the new reference, and match it to the block out head,
and in Maya 2015 I can just use my move / rotate / scale tools to do this.
I'll switch the side camera to a 'Right' view, and import the image plane.
I mentioned with the image planes that precision is very important on the head.
So I'm double checking that I've got a match between my image planes,
by using polygon planes to just create comparison points.
Now, once that's handled, we start modeling, and I will start with a cylinder.
I'll place it over the eye, and give it 12 subdivisions on its axis, and 2 subdivisions on its cap.
And then I'll delete all the faces except for the top cap.
So, it's positioned over the eye, in both the front and side views. And then I'll duplicate it and move it over the mouth.
These two cylinder caps are the basis for our head.
Let's look at the mouth. I'll grab that inner ring of verts. And that will represent the outer edges of the lips.
and then this outer ring is going to represent the shape of the laugh line, and a lot of the animation points around the mouth.
This topology is built with animation in mind. Think about that wireframe we looked at back at the very beginning:
those are the two sets of radial muscles that we're creating right now.
With the lips, I'll get rid of these two sets of triangle edges, so I'm left with that middle edge
and then I'll use Multi-Cut to connect straight up and down
So I'm creating these straight lines from top to bottom, and basically I've got 3 rows of verts:
the top lip, the middle of the lips, and the bottom lip.
Now I want to start positioning these. This second row is very close to the center - I need to move it in
and on the top lip, that vert sits higher than the center point. This is going to create that divot for the philtrum.
I'll tweak the center row, so that it follows the middle line of the lips. I'll tweak the bottom row a little bit
But this 3rd row over here usually needs to come in a little bit closer than that, then I'll have to adjust it to match the reference in that area.
I'll tilt the corner of the mouth down a little bit, that's a very standard posture
Then I'll look at the lips in the side view. And that middle row comes all the way forward to the extents for the lip on the side view.
Similarly, I can pull this vert forward, to right under the nose. This vert comes forward, it's right on the corner of the nose
and that will help guide me in positioning the rest of these.
The outside ring is the laugh line, and it sticks very close to the mouth when we get down to this lower portion.
Now, the 2nd row placement is extremely crucial.
It's almost as far forward as the center row, and in the side view, we can see how close they are together,
make sure you have that kind of relationship between the first and second row.
The 3rd row comes forward, and this outer corner is easy to place, because we'll have the corner of the mouth very visible in the side view.
Now I can start to tweak positions. So we'll bring in the outer edges of lips to match the reference,
and this part should be pretty easy, because we're very literally matching the outlines of the lips here,
Now with the middle of the lips, I'll generally position those verts in the perspective view.
Because I need to push them both back, and inwards towards the center of the mouth.
And then I'll select these edges and Connect Components
to add another row in here. And I can use my Transform Components tool to push these rows out, so that they inflate
and that gives us a lot of the roundness that we need in the lip area.
And we can place those rows in the side view pretty accurately. Now we're left with some triangles in the corner of the mouth.
I'll collapse those to get rid of it. And then I'll switch to my smooth proxy mode (hit the 3 key), to make a few adjustments to the mouth.
Then its time to move on to the eyes. We'll start with the inner ring on the eyes, and that matches the edges of the eyeballs.
We can just line it up to the whites of the eye in our front view.
And similar to what I did with the lips, I connect straight up and down. Then I'll look at the side view,
and when we're placing the verts in the side view,
the center comes all the way forward to the center of the eyeball. And you can find the outer corner most easily,
and we just split the difference between those 2 rows.
Now the inside of the eye, we can't see from the side view. We'll have to place that from the perspective view.
The inside corner of the eye does not go as far back as the outside corner of the eye.
Ok, this outer ring is the ocular orbit - the bone that surrounds the eye.
The upper portion of this is the easiest to define, we just trace along the eyebrow above the eye.
The lower portion sits close to the eye, and then when we place it in the side view, we again line it up based on those eyebrows, that'll make
things pretty easy to find. Now the verts of this row that are on the inside of eye, those sit on the side of the nose,
and the verts on the outside sit very close to the eyeball, so there's not much distance there.
And then the lower verts I'll just move forward a little bit.
I'll hit the 3 key to smooth the eye, same as I did with the mouth. I'll grab the edges around the eye
and use my Crease tool to crease them. And that will give me a sharper shape, and I'll tweak that a little bit.
And now I'll cut in a row very close around the eye, using my Insert Edge Loop tool. This is the eyelid.
We can match it to our reference pretty easily, by looking for the pink around the eye, and placing this row accordingly.
I'll cut in another edge using Insert Edge Loop, and this traces along the outside of the eye, where the
eyelid folds back into the skin of the face. This line is pretty easy to find on the reference,
it's that dark line that overlaps the top of the eyeball. The bottom part? Not so important.
Now for the nose, I make another cylinder, I tilt it up the same way I did before. This one has 8 subdivision axis.
We'll place it around the nose in the front view, and we want to make sure that it matches up to the outside edge of the nostril
and the bottom of the nose. And I'll pull this middle set of rows forward, I'm starting to create the depth of the nose.
I delete the interior edges, and Connect in such a way that I end up with four faces here.
Now I can add some volume into the bulb of the nose. I'll subdivide down the bottom front, pull that forward.
And now the shape of the nose is really starting to take form
I'll make this connection down in the corner here. Just connecting these two verts. This will be important later on.
Right now, I'll grab these edges at the top, and extrude them back to create the bridge of the nose.
And we'll snap that outer point there to the corresponding point on the eye area. This is where we start to merge these together.
Now I'll grab these edges on the bulb of the nose, and I'll connect them
Now we turn that area into some quads. And it's also defining more of the bottom of the nose.
I'll add a point to this triangle here, this is going to be a very important quad.
This is the corner of the nose that meets the laugh line. So the mouth will attach here.
Now I Smooth the nose, and start building the nostril. Remember, you can see the nostril in the side view. The bottom of the nose isn't flat!
So I'll just Extrude - I'll inset a face on the corner there. And I'll position that nostril hole in the front and side views,
and I'll also start to position the septum. Remember, it's very narrow, we can see it in the side view.
Then I make some changes to the shape, it's easier to connect things up when they're not smoothed.
Then I'll grab that face, the nostril, and extrude it up and inwards, to create the negative space that I need.
Now comes the fun part: combining and blending these different areas together. I'll start with the nose and mouth.
I'll move the mouth out of the way. And then I want to look at the topology on the nose: I have these 3 verts, to just 2 verts on the mouth side.
I'll cut in a new set of edges using my Multi Cut, that'll become the philtrum. And I can merge these verts together. So far, so good!
I'll cut another row horizontally across the top of the mouth and I'll subdivide it in such a way that I'm basically adding a whole other row there.
And I can snap that new vert that I just added to the edge of the nose. Now I can extrude straight out from the corner of the nose there,
this will be the fold that really helps us to define the laugh line. You'll see I'm taking time to place it very carefully. I continue that line downward by
extruding from the sides of the laugh line and the mouth area, and then I'll select under the chin and extrude down.
I'll start to to build out the mass of the chin here. We'll see that I have to subdivide in the actual chin
and pull those edges out create the volume of the chin. That leaves me with some un-terminated edges.
What I'll do is just continue those back - I'll cut along this point. And then I grab this edge and extrude all the way back.
And this is going to define my jaw.
I'll move it all the way back to the corner right under the ear, where the ear and the jaw meet, to define my jaw line.
Then I'll extrude straight up, and hit right above the ear. And I'll add a couple of subdivisions
in there, so that I can shape it better from the front view.
Now I'll extrude that entire edge forward. I'll have to cut a subdivision into the jaw
to match that up, so my topology will fit. But now I'm defining more of the cheek area
using my front and side reference. So we need to fill this area in, and I'm not going to continue from the jaw.
Instead, I'll grab the edges under the eye.
I extrude those out in a radial fashion, so my main concern right now is transitioning between the
eye and the nose area. I'll Weld that vert at the top of the eye and nose area,
and I'll move this set of faces in such a way that I can now merge that vert to the nose. And then I use Fill Hole, and now I can start to merge to the
outside cheek area.I'll just flatten that row of verts, so it'll be easier to integrate into the rest of the cheek.
next on grab the edges coming out the mouth, like I did before, and just extrude again.
I'll start by Connecting the bottom-most extrusion. I'll just Bridge across to the corresponding face. Then I'll do these 2 diagonal bridges.
I deleted that one face there, to make things easier, and I'll massage my verts around a little bit
I want to spread them out, that'll make it easier to control both the anatomy and the topology, before I start filling other holes in.
I'll start down here on the chin: I'll cut it another set of rows, and just merge those two sets of verts.
I'm basically continuing that laugh line and all the way around,
so it goes from the side of the nose, all the way under the mouth. That leaves me with this obvious hole on the jaw.
I can just use Fill Hole there. And now I have these two empty areas that I have to fill in, on the cheek.
I start by grabbing these two edges on the cheek, and then Collapsing them together,
which will turn that 5 sided opening into a 4 sided face that we can easily fill.
Now I'm gonna take care of this area above the nose - this is a pretty critical area.
I'll pull this vert up and to the left, and I see that now I've got 2 edges that I can Bridge together to create a nice quad in that region.
So everything is connected, but we've got some triangles here. So I'll collapse a few edges,
we'll see that if the collapse them the way I just did, we get rid of all the triangles, we're left with only quads.
And now we're in the situation where we need to move our verts around
to create proper anatomy. But - I get some lumpiness here, because of the double set of edges I created to define the laugh line,
and that double row is important for animation, but it's not working here. So I'll select this edge ring, and then collapse all those edges together.
Now I'll cut in these extra edges under the nose, because I need some of the detail that I had before,
I'll Collapse that extra edge, and then I'll just take that vert up in the corner
and merge it up to the neighbor to the top left. And now our topology is mostly done, so it's time to tweak to match the likeness.
I'm paying very close attention to my reference, to try match things up, for example, I'm double checking the placement on the eyelids.
The upper eyelid isn't far forward enough, and I have to cut in another set of subdivisions on the eyelid here, so that I can push that up and back,
to create the area were the eyelid folds back on itself. And now I'll turn to the corner of the lip, and I'm trying capture that depth of the fold
fold that's in that region. So I continue that line from the nose down,
and I'll bring it in to a point, because I'm not going to deal with the topology yet. Then I'll tweak those two verts outside the corner of the mouth
to create that overlap and that fold in that area. And you'll see that my camera is going crazy all over the place
because I need to view this from as many possible views
to see what the shape is looking like. So when you're modeling, you should never have your camera static
when you're trying to capture a likeness. We need to move the camera around,
to see your object in 3D from as many angles as possible.
Here I'm grabbing edges in the center of the lips, and using my Crease tool. And now when I crease these verts, they'll hold their position
a little bit better than they did before. This will help capture that fold in that corner of the mouth. One thing that I haven't mentioned is that we
need to be deleting history on our meshes regularly. So: Edit > Delete by Type > History to get rid of all the construction history on my object
and that can help with performance. OK, now I'll connect some edges down at the bottom here,
I'm creating some diagonal edges.
Then I'll select the diagonals going in the opposite direction and delete them. I end up with quads, that resolves the triangle under the cheek.
Next I'm going to refine this area. This particular area is going to be really important for capturing the likeness, so and I'll play around with the
subdivisions in here, and I'll cut in some extra subdivisions, so I can continue the line from the cheek area down into the jaw. That'll allow me to
round out the chin a little bit more, and also cleans up our topology just a little bit. But we are
left with some triangles that we wanna get rid of. So I'll cut diagonally down like that
and I'll select this edge, and collapse it, and then I'll collapse the edge above it, and delete the remaining triangle edge now. Now I'll turn
my attention to the forehead, I'll start with a radial extrusion from the eyebrow area
we'll see that merge that there, I'll just extrude the rest of these out regularly, spread the mouth in the Mao and the no grab the edge and the center
here, and extrude that straight over, merging together to the bridge of the nose
Now I can just take all the edges on the top and extrude them straight up, and reposition them and match to my reference
Then I'll extrude up again, so I can get more of the curvature of the shape. Then I spend a lot of time massaging verts,
so they are evenly distributed, the forehead should be a very smooth area. Now it's time to focus on the likeness.
I'll combine the two halves of my head together, and merge the verts together in the center. And you'll note that I have a bunch of edges creased
(that's what those bold edges are) you might want to try that depending on what your character looks like.
Now that the topology is done I can go through and make tweaks to the mesh without having to worry about the topology.
So I'm looking very carefully at my reference, you'll see how closely zoomed in I am, in both of the orthographic views.
Right now, for example I'm creating that upward motion under the lips
to create the shadowing that I see there. And now I'm working on the nose to broaden that a little bit.
Next, I create a sphere for the skull. And I'll choose a sphere that has about the same number of subdivisions as my head
Then I'll snap points up to the forehead, to match it up. And once that's in place, I can adjust the size of it, but we want to remember that the
skull is bigger in the rear of the skull, than it is at the front. So it tapers to the front a little bit. And then I can just extrude straight down and add
a few subdivisions to rounds things out. That's about all the detail we need for the head. Now the ear is another cylinder cap
and I'll just match it up in the side view. And I'll connect the ear on these verts here. We'll see that the ear sits
flush with the cheek. And I'll extrude it backwards. Remember that it's not even when we extrude it backwards. Now I can delete these
faces on the head, and extrude out from the corresponding faces on the ear
then I'll take those resulting faces and snap them to the head. And those points that merge together to create the whole shape and
Now I'll do some more asymmetry tweaking: I move the eyes and the nose to match the reference better. I do this last because in case I
need to make large structural changes to my mesh, it'll still be symmetrical, and therefore easy to change. I'll make changes in the brow region I'll
make that chin more asymmetrical, the brow protrudes a little bit too much, so I'll push that back in
We end up with this, which is a passable likeness. And now the modeling phase is done, and I can move to next steps
I'm going to tackle UV mapping and unwrapping next. I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching