Tuesday 13 October 2009
Wednesday 29 October 2008
UV Co-ordinates part 2
Click on edit in the UVW Unwrap modifier. Now we want to treat the ear. We will be using the same process as before. Turn off the chequer map press M on the key board and turn off the blue and white checked box. Press L to get into left mode make sure you have paint selection and we are in face sub object mode and then just click and drag over various parts. Click on alt on the keyboard to remove any unwanted selection. Now we want to move down to map parameters. The normal projection methods will not work well because there is a lot of overlapping detail; we want to give pelt mapping a reference point, a way to flatten it out. So we have to work out the dominant direction which in our case is the left view. Click on planar and fit so the fit is snug. We now move over to pelt, the way pelt mapping works it pulls your surface and stretches it out, so what it is going to do is latch onto each of these edge vertices along the seam and pull them out away from the centre and as a result flattening out the rest of the shape. So, what we need to do is to define a couple of break seams where we can separate the mesh, because if we just stretch this out it will not completely flatten. Edit seams by singularly clicking on any particular edge or we have a point to point seam. Click on one point and drag the cursor to the next point and click it will trace a line from one to the next. We now have a nice seam where it can split apart a bit.
Edit pelt map this brings up a dialogue box identical to the UV dialogue box the only difference is that we are in pelt editing mode so if we click on individual UV coordinates here it wont have any effect on the mesh. We just want to modify this outer ring which is called the stretcher. Click on the scale tool, give us some space we also want to rotate the stretcher so that it is pulling the various parts in the right direction. Just gain which ever shape you want. Simulate pelt pulling, what happens right away is that the ear is pulled out. You can do this several times until you have a nice flattened shape. Now that we are done close the box down and the texture coordinates are assigned to our face selection. So if we bring back our material checker and zoom in we have a pretty decent coverage. There are some areas that need to be tweaked by hand. So go back to parameters, click edit, filter our selected faces, freeform mode and scale down ear as it is to big, in relation to the head.
Ideally we would like to fit the ear into the gap for the ear in the face map. However just using a 3D painting tool we could easily place the ear somewhere else. Lets just clean up the results a little bit. What you want to avoid in your UV layout is avoid ambiguous quads.
Now we need to look at how we can fit this into the head. As I click in various vertices, it highlights blue vertices on the face map which match up. It doesn’t look as though we are going to be able to fit this into the space as we will get overlap. Just generally fit it into the cavity .Not a lot of detail - select element and drag down to the corner. Turn on select element and scale the ear up a little. Now we will test that there are no overlapping parts or inverted quads. Move over to face mode, click and emptly space to deselect and to upt to select and inverted faces. We have one inverted face here because of ambiguous quads. Make it clear how the quad is formed jump back to inverted faces and it is no longer inverted. Go to select overlapping faces and tweak if necessary. Close down edit UVWs get out of face mode, and go to symmetry. You will notice that it is the same both sides, if we place the UVW Unwrap modifier on top of the symmetry modifier we can modifiy both parts of it. This can be tricky, go to face mode, element and click on the head, on the mirrored side. Click on mirror and drag it off to the side. Bring the two seams together and line up as best you can. Switch to vertex mode and weld the seam so that it is a nice consistent mapping layer. Click and drag and Control W – becomes one texture component. Makes a white line to show it is welded. If you weld two vertices that you don’t want to weld this can be fixed by going to select the offending vertices and handle one by one, or underneath options you can decrease the weld threshold. We now have a nice white line running down the middle. Now this is all done go to select element click on the ear and make sure that you get the right ear – drag to the side and mirror. Now we are going to set up into the format that you want. Underneath options put in your bitmap size. Resize the map to fit into the background. You need a small amount of buffer around the layout. Now we want to turn this into an image to take into photoshop.
Tools > render UVW template. Guess aspect ratio, or specify width and height. Click Render and you can see the rendered image with the seams as well. Turn off seam edges and you have a nice clean white guide to be brought into Photoshop use it as a mask.
Fill mode can be used to fill with a solid colour or shaded information or, normal information. This can be used as a starting point for our texture. You will also notice that it shows overlap in red, you can fix these overlaps. Shaded option renders out the image based on UV co-ordinates.
Edit pelt map this brings up a dialogue box identical to the UV dialogue box the only difference is that we are in pelt editing mode so if we click on individual UV coordinates here it wont have any effect on the mesh. We just want to modify this outer ring which is called the stretcher. Click on the scale tool, give us some space we also want to rotate the stretcher so that it is pulling the various parts in the right direction. Just gain which ever shape you want. Simulate pelt pulling, what happens right away is that the ear is pulled out. You can do this several times until you have a nice flattened shape. Now that we are done close the box down and the texture coordinates are assigned to our face selection. So if we bring back our material checker and zoom in we have a pretty decent coverage. There are some areas that need to be tweaked by hand. So go back to parameters, click edit, filter our selected faces, freeform mode and scale down ear as it is to big, in relation to the head.
Ideally we would like to fit the ear into the gap for the ear in the face map. However just using a 3D painting tool we could easily place the ear somewhere else. Lets just clean up the results a little bit. What you want to avoid in your UV layout is avoid ambiguous quads.
Now we need to look at how we can fit this into the head. As I click in various vertices, it highlights blue vertices on the face map which match up. It doesn’t look as though we are going to be able to fit this into the space as we will get overlap. Just generally fit it into the cavity .Not a lot of detail - select element and drag down to the corner. Turn on select element and scale the ear up a little. Now we will test that there are no overlapping parts or inverted quads. Move over to face mode, click and emptly space to deselect and to upt to select and inverted faces. We have one inverted face here because of ambiguous quads. Make it clear how the quad is formed jump back to inverted faces and it is no longer inverted. Go to select overlapping faces and tweak if necessary. Close down edit UVWs get out of face mode, and go to symmetry. You will notice that it is the same both sides, if we place the UVW Unwrap modifier on top of the symmetry modifier we can modifiy both parts of it. This can be tricky, go to face mode, element and click on the head, on the mirrored side. Click on mirror and drag it off to the side. Bring the two seams together and line up as best you can. Switch to vertex mode and weld the seam so that it is a nice consistent mapping layer. Click and drag and Control W – becomes one texture component. Makes a white line to show it is welded. If you weld two vertices that you don’t want to weld this can be fixed by going to select the offending vertices and handle one by one, or underneath options you can decrease the weld threshold. We now have a nice white line running down the middle. Now this is all done go to select element click on the ear and make sure that you get the right ear – drag to the side and mirror. Now we are going to set up into the format that you want. Underneath options put in your bitmap size. Resize the map to fit into the background. You need a small amount of buffer around the layout. Now we want to turn this into an image to take into photoshop.
Tools > render UVW template. Guess aspect ratio, or specify width and height. Click Render and you can see the rendered image with the seams as well. Turn off seam edges and you have a nice clean white guide to be brought into Photoshop use it as a mask.
Fill mode can be used to fill with a solid colour or shaded information or, normal information. This can be used as a starting point for our texture. You will also notice that it shows overlap in red, you can fix these overlaps. Shaded option renders out the image based on UV co-ordinates.
Thursday 23 October 2008
Tutorial 9 - UV Coordinates
This process is quite lengthy and will be handled in two parts.
Only want to set up the mapping coordinates for one side of the model and editable poly is the current modifier. Make sure that you are not in sub object mode.
Click on Unwrap UVW modifier, which should be placed above the editable poly modifier and under the symmetry modifier in the stack.
We are going to use cylindrical projection mapping for the majority of the head and pelt mapping for the ear as it is a complex shape.
Click on unwrap and go into face sub object mode, go to the left view port and turn off ignore back facing. Change our marquee mode to paint, hold down control on the keyboard and just go over and paint our selection. We want to avoid the ear as we will be handling this separately.
Now the face is painted go to map parameters. Five options, planar, cylindrical spherical and box, similar to the UVW modifier. Use cylindrical method as we want the texture to flow nicely around the head. It is currently following the wrong direction so we use the align buttons to choose the correct orientation. In the top view port our mesh is not entirely within the cylindrical gizmo. So scale our cylindrical gizmo up and centre it. If it is not centred you will get all these additional green lines which are seams which are discontinuities in the UV layout. What you want is one seam going down the middle. Come out of cylindrical mode, and before we do some fine modifications to the texture coordinates we want to see the effect we are having on it. So apply a checker pattern on the object. If you press M to bring up the material editor and apply. We can see many stretched out areas here and ideally each of these chequers should be square, and that’s far from the case. Now we have this set up under parameters on the right hand side, press edit., this brings up our Edit UVs dialogue box. We only want to only focus on the face here not the ear. We can tell max to hide everything except all the faces we have identified with the filter selected faces button. Press on that and the ear will disappear. Under options, there are a couple of things we want to change here. Make sure that tile bitmap is off. Make sure that constant update is on, and what this is, is when we start pulling points around it will update in the view port in real time. Deselect everything.
One of the first things you want to do is make sure that the texture co ordinates came in correctly. Select > select inverted faces. Inverted faces are pretty nasty especially if you want to go over to another package such as ZBrush you use it for creating displacement maps or normal maps. You can see that the majority of our faces are inverted. Click and drag on all the faces, click on the mirror tool and position this in out little square here. You can also resize this with the little apparatus surrounding out selection. If you click and drag on one of the corners you can resize it, on the sides you can rotate and in the middle you can move. Now this apparatus is achieved through the freeform mode, we can also move rotate and scale the selection.
Look at one troubled area the top of the head, if we look at our UV coordinates, you can see that this one face going along the top of the head here is stretched significantly which is using a lot of pixels whereas others are not using up much at all. To fix this use the relax tool in 3D S Max. Select the various vertices that we need go up to tools > relax dialogue make sure that it is relax by edge angles and then click apply. You notice that it rounded out the top of the head making the top in our view port clearer and much more uniform. We basically want to do this for the rest of the head, going into troubled areas and you can run the relax several times to get the effect we want. When setting up your UV’s make sure that you don’t have any ambiguous quads. Here you notice that if I don’t move this point it looks like a triangle which will lead to problems;
Lets look at another troubled area, the eye, if we zoom in really close to the eye you will see that we have a lot of overlapping parts. These need to be flattened out so there ar no overlapping parts. So switchover to vertex mode go to paint select mode and press the plus sign several time to increase out brush size click and drag over the vertices that we want to work with, here the ones directly surrounding the eye. Click on Relax by edge angles, which doesn’t seem to fixing it its just collapsing on them, so now click on Relax by centres - now much cleaner. Zoom in and switch to the paint tool again, select the various points of the first two rows, scale – scale them in, can switch over to edges, select one of the edges in the second row, you can use ring edges or loop to speed up the selection. You now have a cleaner eye socket. You need to do this for the rest of the head. You now have all the UV’s sorted out for the rest of the face. You want to make sure that you have no inverted or overlapped faces that make for a very clean UV layout. If we choose overlapped faces, and we have one at the corner of the mouth, go to edit vertex mode and move it out of the way. Go to face mode and select overlapping faces and we no longer have any. Make sure that you run these periodically to make sure everything is fine and a nice clean UV layout. So now the head is fairly uniform and a good end result.
Only want to set up the mapping coordinates for one side of the model and editable poly is the current modifier. Make sure that you are not in sub object mode.
Click on Unwrap UVW modifier, which should be placed above the editable poly modifier and under the symmetry modifier in the stack.
We are going to use cylindrical projection mapping for the majority of the head and pelt mapping for the ear as it is a complex shape.
Click on unwrap and go into face sub object mode, go to the left view port and turn off ignore back facing. Change our marquee mode to paint, hold down control on the keyboard and just go over and paint our selection. We want to avoid the ear as we will be handling this separately.
Now the face is painted go to map parameters. Five options, planar, cylindrical spherical and box, similar to the UVW modifier. Use cylindrical method as we want the texture to flow nicely around the head. It is currently following the wrong direction so we use the align buttons to choose the correct orientation. In the top view port our mesh is not entirely within the cylindrical gizmo. So scale our cylindrical gizmo up and centre it. If it is not centred you will get all these additional green lines which are seams which are discontinuities in the UV layout. What you want is one seam going down the middle. Come out of cylindrical mode, and before we do some fine modifications to the texture coordinates we want to see the effect we are having on it. So apply a checker pattern on the object. If you press M to bring up the material editor and apply. We can see many stretched out areas here and ideally each of these chequers should be square, and that’s far from the case. Now we have this set up under parameters on the right hand side, press edit., this brings up our Edit UVs dialogue box. We only want to only focus on the face here not the ear. We can tell max to hide everything except all the faces we have identified with the filter selected faces button. Press on that and the ear will disappear. Under options, there are a couple of things we want to change here. Make sure that tile bitmap is off. Make sure that constant update is on, and what this is, is when we start pulling points around it will update in the view port in real time. Deselect everything.
One of the first things you want to do is make sure that the texture co ordinates came in correctly. Select > select inverted faces. Inverted faces are pretty nasty especially if you want to go over to another package such as ZBrush you use it for creating displacement maps or normal maps. You can see that the majority of our faces are inverted. Click and drag on all the faces, click on the mirror tool and position this in out little square here. You can also resize this with the little apparatus surrounding out selection. If you click and drag on one of the corners you can resize it, on the sides you can rotate and in the middle you can move. Now this apparatus is achieved through the freeform mode, we can also move rotate and scale the selection.
Look at one troubled area the top of the head, if we look at our UV coordinates, you can see that this one face going along the top of the head here is stretched significantly which is using a lot of pixels whereas others are not using up much at all. To fix this use the relax tool in 3D S Max. Select the various vertices that we need go up to tools > relax dialogue make sure that it is relax by edge angles and then click apply. You notice that it rounded out the top of the head making the top in our view port clearer and much more uniform. We basically want to do this for the rest of the head, going into troubled areas and you can run the relax several times to get the effect we want. When setting up your UV’s make sure that you don’t have any ambiguous quads. Here you notice that if I don’t move this point it looks like a triangle which will lead to problems;
Lets look at another troubled area, the eye, if we zoom in really close to the eye you will see that we have a lot of overlapping parts. These need to be flattened out so there ar no overlapping parts. So switchover to vertex mode go to paint select mode and press the plus sign several time to increase out brush size click and drag over the vertices that we want to work with, here the ones directly surrounding the eye. Click on Relax by edge angles, which doesn’t seem to fixing it its just collapsing on them, so now click on Relax by centres - now much cleaner. Zoom in and switch to the paint tool again, select the various points of the first two rows, scale – scale them in, can switch over to edges, select one of the edges in the second row, you can use ring edges or loop to speed up the selection. You now have a cleaner eye socket. You need to do this for the rest of the head. You now have all the UV’s sorted out for the rest of the face. You want to make sure that you have no inverted or overlapped faces that make for a very clean UV layout. If we choose overlapped faces, and we have one at the corner of the mouth, go to edit vertex mode and move it out of the way. Go to face mode and select overlapping faces and we no longer have any. Make sure that you run these periodically to make sure everything is fine and a nice clean UV layout. So now the head is fairly uniform and a good end result.
Wednesday 22 October 2008
Tutorial 8 - Ear Creation
A very difficult piece of geometry and very complex.
Use a similar method that we did for the face for the ear.
Load reference image, and define some key areas.
From this point we want to start drawing in the topology, same idea as before, connecting the lines, and making new ones. Create the necessary quads. Don’t worry about making this too complex. Take this into 3D Max and start sculpting the ear.
Load the head into Max. F4 you can see all the edges of the face. Select the head and hide. Uncheck hide frozen objects. Go into left view and zoom in. It is very pixelated, so need to change the resolution of the downloaded texture size. Max uses a standard size, so we need to override this setting via customise menu. Customise > preferences > configure driver. Download texture size – match bitmap size, ok.
Material editor, have reference plain texture. Click on diffuse M and underneath file name for the bitmap, click reload. The detail is much crisper.
Create shapes line, both set to corner, start drawing the quads again. Can put on snaps to make life easier. Work your way around the geometry. Attach quads to make a surface. Select one quad > modify > edit poly > attach. Vertex mode click and drag over vertices –weld.
Line the ear up with the front reference plain. Pull out the vertices to fit the image as you did before with the face. Alt X to make the model semi transparent. Line up the outer ring of the ear, and then the inner ear.
Look at the reference image, edge mode, select the edges that you wish to bring forward or back, and trace around the ear canal area. When selected on the right hand side pick on chamfer, just a small amount to make a border around the edges. Need to clean up the corners. Edit ,select the smaller edge, edit geometry > collapse which gets rid of the annoying corners.
Polygon mode > edit poly > inset mode. For this you do not have to use inset chamfer.
Add turbo smooth modifier onto the ear to help the representation. Click on see end result so that you can see the high resolution model while you are modelling.
Use a similar method that we did for the face for the ear.
Load reference image, and define some key areas.
From this point we want to start drawing in the topology, same idea as before, connecting the lines, and making new ones. Create the necessary quads. Don’t worry about making this too complex. Take this into 3D Max and start sculpting the ear.
Load the head into Max. F4 you can see all the edges of the face. Select the head and hide. Uncheck hide frozen objects. Go into left view and zoom in. It is very pixelated, so need to change the resolution of the downloaded texture size. Max uses a standard size, so we need to override this setting via customise menu. Customise > preferences > configure driver. Download texture size – match bitmap size, ok.
Material editor, have reference plain texture. Click on diffuse M and underneath file name for the bitmap, click reload. The detail is much crisper.
Create shapes line, both set to corner, start drawing the quads again. Can put on snaps to make life easier. Work your way around the geometry. Attach quads to make a surface. Select one quad > modify > edit poly > attach. Vertex mode click and drag over vertices –weld.
Line the ear up with the front reference plain. Pull out the vertices to fit the image as you did before with the face. Alt X to make the model semi transparent. Line up the outer ring of the ear, and then the inner ear.
Look at the reference image, edge mode, select the edges that you wish to bring forward or back, and trace around the ear canal area. When selected on the right hand side pick on chamfer, just a small amount to make a border around the edges. Need to clean up the corners. Edit ,select the smaller edge, edit geometry > collapse which gets rid of the annoying corners.
Polygon mode > edit poly > inset mode. For this you do not have to use inset chamfer.
Add turbo smooth modifier onto the ear to help the representation. Click on see end result so that you can see the high resolution model while you are modelling.
Tutorial 7 - Primitive extension for the back of the head
If you go to Photoshop to the reference guide, you need to look at how the topology flows to use the topology as a reference. Define key lines in the neck area; it doesn’t need to be precise. We want to bring lines going out through the shoulder. You want to isolate the ear. We have a line under the jaw, under the ear and behind the ear. Also lines to show the folds of fat in the back of the neck.
Assign this map to the reference plates. If you had trouble finding the reference plates go over to display>hide frozen objects> uncheck.
Make a sphere and use the geometry to make the back of the head. Create a sphere. Turn on edges (F4 on the keyboard) so we can see how they are all lined up and we want to do this in main views. Roughly position it over our head, ALT X will make it semi transparent. You want to orientate the poles of the sphere, as there are so many triangles. Rotate the sphere so the poles are where the ears would be. Scale to fit. Take a closer look at the geometry and how it fits with the existing geometry. You can increase segment size to fit that of the face you have modelled. Edit poly > polygon > turn on the paint selection marquee. Start painting. You do not want interior polys and we only really want the back of the head. Once selected, then delete. Select all the faces on the right hand side. If we don’t do this we will get all sort of duplicate polygons that we don’t need.
Need to line these up, vertex mode> turn on snap, we want to configure our snap option as vertex, and now we go to move tool and click and drag to various points. Line up the closest ones first. Turn on soft selection, so that there are no shape edges.
Turn on soft selection. If you need more control you could use the falloff values or adjust the curve.
Turn off soft selection and continue to align. Press Alt X to get the surface back.
Select edge with shift to create new polygons for the neck area.
Because there are a lot of points, it makes things difficult. Use a smoothing algorithm for this. Simplify the geometry. Hide the reference plates. Select every other edge > Ring, it selects the edges that are parallel to those you have selected. Click on ring > edit geometry > collapse. This makes the geometry easy to modify and work with. I have highlighted the jugular vein and collar bone. We now go ahead and attach the head to the face so that we can see it on both sides. Select face >edit poly > edit geometry > attach, click on attach and on object that we wish to make the current one. The head is now attached. You can test to make sure that all the vertices are one. Go to paint option, go ahead and select several of the vertices, press on settings box on weld.
Assign this map to the reference plates. If you had trouble finding the reference plates go over to display>hide frozen objects> uncheck.
Make a sphere and use the geometry to make the back of the head. Create a sphere. Turn on edges (F4 on the keyboard) so we can see how they are all lined up and we want to do this in main views. Roughly position it over our head, ALT X will make it semi transparent. You want to orientate the poles of the sphere, as there are so many triangles. Rotate the sphere so the poles are where the ears would be. Scale to fit. Take a closer look at the geometry and how it fits with the existing geometry. You can increase segment size to fit that of the face you have modelled. Edit poly > polygon > turn on the paint selection marquee. Start painting. You do not want interior polys and we only really want the back of the head. Once selected, then delete. Select all the faces on the right hand side. If we don’t do this we will get all sort of duplicate polygons that we don’t need.
Need to line these up, vertex mode> turn on snap, we want to configure our snap option as vertex, and now we go to move tool and click and drag to various points. Line up the closest ones first. Turn on soft selection, so that there are no shape edges.
Turn on soft selection. If you need more control you could use the falloff values or adjust the curve.
Turn off soft selection and continue to align. Press Alt X to get the surface back.
Select edge with shift to create new polygons for the neck area.
Because there are a lot of points, it makes things difficult. Use a smoothing algorithm for this. Simplify the geometry. Hide the reference plates. Select every other edge > Ring, it selects the edges that are parallel to those you have selected. Click on ring > edit geometry > collapse. This makes the geometry easy to modify and work with. I have highlighted the jugular vein and collar bone. We now go ahead and attach the head to the face so that we can see it on both sides. Select face >edit poly > edit geometry > attach, click on attach and on object that we wish to make the current one. The head is now attached. You can test to make sure that all the vertices are one. Go to paint option, go ahead and select several of the vertices, press on settings box on weld.
Tutorial 6 - Refining Model (the nose)
Refining organic models with Edit Poly
How to add details to your model.
Switch to the front view and maximise so we can access the nose area.
We are going to add some additional faces.
Select object > modify editable poly > show end result and then go into edge mode. Select the edges that follow around the outside of the nostrils. Select edge hold down shift and drag you will create a copy, which you can move or rotate. So select the 5 edges hold down shift on the key board and click and drag. Go to vertex mode to space out the vertices.
You need to produce a nice edge flow going all the way round the tip of the nose. The fleshy tissue goes from the tip of the nose down and around to the edge of the nasal cavity. We are going to attach the vertexes to the corner point of the nasal cavity.
Turn on snap and click and drag. Currently the vertices are still separate so we need to click and drag over the three vertices and click weld. Now it is a single vertex. We have a fairly decent flow of quads but this is not enough detail to model a decent nose so we will have to add additional geometry all round. Max has a neat tool called connect and the way it works, it takes any edges selected and creates an edge that connects them. Select all the edges underneath the nose in one continuous loop. Under Edit edges > connect click on the settings next to it and play with the dialogue box. When we increase the amount of segments it determines the amount of times we connect our edges. A value of 0 will connect from the midpoint all the way round. We want 1 segment, 0 pinch, 0 slide > OK.
So we have some additional detail here. We have a five sided polygon that we need to get rid of as the edges stop abruptly. We need to use another tool called “Cut” – edit geometry > cut. As I drag the cursor over the mesh there are three distinct shapes, for vertex, edge and face. We want to move cursor over the end vertex, click once and then move the cursor to the centre of the space. The cut tool allows you to draw your edges so easily to make changes to your topology. This created a nice quad; go to corner to edge you can make all quads again. You can get out of the cut mode by right clicking.
In vertex mood, we follow the loop around and there is a hard seam between the tip of the nose and the nostrils. We go to edge mode and hit backspace which will remove an edge. If you delete you remove the whole polygon.
Jump back to vertex mode, just space them out a bit more. We need to close the gap of the nostril. Want to give the illusion of a nasal cavity. Go to polygon mode, edit geometry >create button. Draw in a polygon. Left click to select the polygon in centre of the nostril. Jump out of front view to perspective view. Start to tweak the vertices of the edge of the nostril.
We are going to create the nasal cavity. Get a good view of underneath the nose, and select the polygon you have just created. Use the extrude tool to do this. It needs to be a negative value to take the nostril into the head. Position it to make it look more natural to the side. Tune on turbo smooth to view the nostril.
How to add details to your model.
Switch to the front view and maximise so we can access the nose area.
We are going to add some additional faces.
Select object > modify editable poly > show end result and then go into edge mode. Select the edges that follow around the outside of the nostrils. Select edge hold down shift and drag you will create a copy, which you can move or rotate. So select the 5 edges hold down shift on the key board and click and drag. Go to vertex mode to space out the vertices.
You need to produce a nice edge flow going all the way round the tip of the nose. The fleshy tissue goes from the tip of the nose down and around to the edge of the nasal cavity. We are going to attach the vertexes to the corner point of the nasal cavity.
Turn on snap and click and drag. Currently the vertices are still separate so we need to click and drag over the three vertices and click weld. Now it is a single vertex. We have a fairly decent flow of quads but this is not enough detail to model a decent nose so we will have to add additional geometry all round. Max has a neat tool called connect and the way it works, it takes any edges selected and creates an edge that connects them. Select all the edges underneath the nose in one continuous loop. Under Edit edges > connect click on the settings next to it and play with the dialogue box. When we increase the amount of segments it determines the amount of times we connect our edges. A value of 0 will connect from the midpoint all the way round. We want 1 segment, 0 pinch, 0 slide > OK.
So we have some additional detail here. We have a five sided polygon that we need to get rid of as the edges stop abruptly. We need to use another tool called “Cut” – edit geometry > cut. As I drag the cursor over the mesh there are three distinct shapes, for vertex, edge and face. We want to move cursor over the end vertex, click once and then move the cursor to the centre of the space. The cut tool allows you to draw your edges so easily to make changes to your topology. This created a nice quad; go to corner to edge you can make all quads again. You can get out of the cut mode by right clicking.
In vertex mood, we follow the loop around and there is a hard seam between the tip of the nose and the nostrils. We go to edge mode and hit backspace which will remove an edge. If you delete you remove the whole polygon.
Jump back to vertex mode, just space them out a bit more. We need to close the gap of the nostril. Want to give the illusion of a nasal cavity. Go to polygon mode, edit geometry >create button. Draw in a polygon. Left click to select the polygon in centre of the nostril. Jump out of front view to perspective view. Start to tweak the vertices of the edge of the nostril.
We are going to create the nasal cavity. Get a good view of underneath the nose, and select the polygon you have just created. Use the extrude tool to do this. It needs to be a negative value to take the nostril into the head. Position it to make it look more natural to the side. Tune on turbo smooth to view the nostril.
Tuesday 2 September 2008
Tutorial 5 - Using symmetry and sub-division
5 - Symmetry and Sub-division
This tutorial describes how you can use Symmetry, so that you can make changes to one side of the model, and it affects both sides; also how to subdivide your mesh in order to smooth it off.
There are several ways to mirror your model.
Mirror tool
Select the object – and select Mirror tool from the tool bar. Choose which axis that you want to mirror the object in. You can then choose from the following:
Copy – a unique object
Instance – provides information between the clone and the original
Reference – One way communication, the clone mimics the original with changes but you cannot modify the clone.
This way of mirroring applies an inverse scale matrix, so that if the model is merged into another programme the normals could end up becoming inverted, which causes problems.
Clone
Select the object > right click > clone > reference.
When you select reference, Max places a grey bar above edit poly in the stack, suggesting that anything below the grey bar is duplicated, anything above will be specific to the clone.
Mirror modifier
This is the export friendly way to mirror your object.
Select the object and apply the mirror modifier and check ‘Flip face’. If the axis of the object is too close and it looks odd, select the + sign next to symmetry in the stack and it will reveal ‘Mirror’. With this selected you can move your clone and orientate it.
If you click on ‘Show end result’ you can see the changes you are making to the mesh without having to toggle from mirror to edit poly.
Subdivision Surfaces
In order to smooth your surfaces within editable poly you can choose ‘nurbs sub-division’. Here you can choose the amount of iterations you would like, and you can also specify whether you require those iterations on rendering.
Choosing sub-division can highlight problems in your modelling.
There are several other subdivision modifiers such as ‘Turbosmooth’, ‘Meshsmooth’, ‘HSDS’, ‘Subdivide’ and ‘Tessilate’.
This tutorial describes how you can use Symmetry, so that you can make changes to one side of the model, and it affects both sides; also how to subdivide your mesh in order to smooth it off.
There are several ways to mirror your model.
Mirror tool
Select the object – and select Mirror tool from the tool bar. Choose which axis that you want to mirror the object in. You can then choose from the following:
Copy – a unique object
Instance – provides information between the clone and the original
Reference – One way communication, the clone mimics the original with changes but you cannot modify the clone.
This way of mirroring applies an inverse scale matrix, so that if the model is merged into another programme the normals could end up becoming inverted, which causes problems.
Clone
Select the object > right click > clone > reference.
When you select reference, Max places a grey bar above edit poly in the stack, suggesting that anything below the grey bar is duplicated, anything above will be specific to the clone.
Mirror modifier
This is the export friendly way to mirror your object.
Select the object and apply the mirror modifier and check ‘Flip face’. If the axis of the object is too close and it looks odd, select the + sign next to symmetry in the stack and it will reveal ‘Mirror’. With this selected you can move your clone and orientate it.
If you click on ‘Show end result’ you can see the changes you are making to the mesh without having to toggle from mirror to edit poly.
Subdivision Surfaces
In order to smooth your surfaces within editable poly you can choose ‘nurbs sub-division’. Here you can choose the amount of iterations you would like, and you can also specify whether you require those iterations on rendering.
Choosing sub-division can highlight problems in your modelling.
There are several other subdivision modifiers such as ‘Turbosmooth’, ‘Meshsmooth’, ‘HSDS’, ‘Subdivide’ and ‘Tessilate’.
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