Modelling a Character Head. (In 3ds Max)

Hello guys and welcome to another Edition of Animations on HypefroActive. Ok, I really am excited to be with you today after an AWOL. And because we like to serve fresh Animation topics and tips every time we hit the web, a bit more research has been done into the world of Animations by yours truly and this time it’s the modelling arm. Well, nothing too flashy again, but a little bit more complex and appealing than what I used to do. So without much ado, lets go.

For some time I’ve been doing some drawing on low key for the sake of character design because I think that’s one of the things I’ld like to develop in my animation work. It wasn’t all that difficult because I did plenty of drawing as a kid. I spent time then drawing comic characters like “Captain America, The Hulk, Thor, Spider Man etc”. So coming back later in life to draw straight manga, Disney or pixar characters wasn’t that much of a problem. I've also come to learn that drawing on its own is wide and goes beyond one or two weeks of trainning if you really want to be very good at it. Anyways, the little I picked up was enough to get me on my way. So I fired up 3dsmax and started thus…

Creating a Box of about 40 by 20 by 20, I made sure it was centered on all the axis by zeroing out the x,y and z axis. Converted into an editable poly then went to the object properties by right clicking to turn on see through and backface cull. These two makes it some how transparent so that I can at least see through the reference I would be using to model it. Ok, so that’s done and it’s time to bring in the reference, but before then it's good advice to delete half of the box and add a symetry modifier to

Googled image used as reference

mirror the other side. Now, there’s a bit of problem with bringing in the reference because I didn’t really want to model any of what I drew, so I googled up some images and got an extra from a the movie rio and at the end I had about three of them I’ld want to work with but didn’t want it to look exactly like any of them. Anyways I went ahead and brought one into Max and began working with that.

First thing I did was to create the facial divisions on the box so that it looks like a face, taking into account the levels of the eyes, nose, chin, and head.  Then the box is shaped into the head reference. At this time the head should be divided into three sections. The first covers the fore head, next is the eyes and nose then the mouth   lines and connecting them somewhere at the bridge of the nose near the eyes with an horizontal line, the journey begins. I worked mainly on the edge and vertex sub object levels

Vertical lines carving out the nose

here, either connecting lines together in the edge mode or using cut in the vertex mode to draw lines between vertices. Looking at my reference with a little imagination based on previous modeling experience, I shaped the nose into what you see in the pix. One of the references has that and I liked the idea of the long pointed nose. But I didn’t want the eyes on the level the ones in the ref were so I brought mine down. I probably didn’t need any drawing to tell me that as I already know what I wanted it to look like and drawing it out would have been perfect but it would further take my time.

sculpting the nose and carving out the mouth

I always start with the nose. Drawing two vertical lines and crossing them with an horizontal at the ridge. Then i continue by bringing the tip out while the second line stays connected to the face and i work my way through buy cutting and and connecting edges until i get the desired results.

making mouth divisions

Anyways, the next thing I did was to sculpt the mouth. I began by drawing perpendicular lines to divide that region into four sections. Then connected them again until I got a rhombus (a slant-like rectangle) which I later inset, cut more edges to form the lips and continuing using these combos until the mouth formed. The Eye is the trickiest part because you have to take the eye sockets into consideration and blend the curves obtained to the ones gotten from the bridge of the nose. So you begin by creating a deep well-like eye socket that will contrast the soon to emerge eyeballs. And you this by going to the vertex mode, right clicking and using the cut commands to cut a six or so polygon representing the eye socket. This can be refined later to include more sides and

working on the eyes

make it into something looking more like a circle. A tip, in 3dsmax, most major tools used in modeling are found on the control panel that by default docks on the right of the interface. They are also available for use by right-clicking an the modelled object. In this section, re-distribution of edges and inseting of polygons will be what you’ll need to do here mostly. Then you could also use the cut tool to add necessary edges that would improve the topography of the model. You have to be focused and patient while doing this and employ whatever skill that you can to achieve what you have in mind because one or two wrongly placed edges or vertices could change the appearance of what you have in mind.

refining the head model

Continue refining until you are satisfied with what you have on your screen. Afterwards, you’ll have to focus on the face in general. This section would cover the edges that cut across the sides of the face to the bridge of the nose. See this as horizontal cuts and the ones to cross them will be the vertical ones, coming from the vertices of the eye sockets down to the lines of the mouth created earlier. Another tip is that you try as much as possible to keep all the polygons four sided and that is the maximum. Being mindful of the number of sides your polygons actually have which in this case, four, is good practice. Now it’s possible to have three especially at the edges and in some cases like when you are trying to take down the poly count of an object but these cases are when it’s absolutely necessary and other than that, four should adopted as correct practice and this keeps things really simple and uniform for you. Then another thing to watch out for is loose vertices. These happens majorly when you are in the vertex mode and you use the cut tool. Things like this can pose a problem while skinning and animating the character.

variants of the head model

These are the key features of the head. In refining the fore head, just adopt the same procedure for the cheeks and you’ll be fine. And that goes for the rest of the untouched parts of the head. It sounds easy when I write this here but would help if you have been practicing before now on how to model characters  or at least have the patience and determination  to get better at modeling. Anyways from
here I could go on to bring out variants of this head model and can use them as I deem fit. It’s just a matter of re-distributing the edge flows and behold the variants. So that’s that about modeling of my new character’s head. And until we meet again, keep animating.