Face - Finished..

Well, I gave up on the mapping as that would have taken forever, and it wasn't going right anyway... So here's the finished thing!

I'm very pleased with how it turned out as it looks quite like me, especially from the sides - not too sure on the front view though!
I really did enjoy this module very much even though it caused a lot of stress! It's a shame I didn't get round to completing it fully with the map on my face as I was running out of time, however I'm sure I will mess about with it after the module has been handed in. If I was to redo this module again, I would definately sort my nostrils out so that it looked more realistic as it doesn't match up. I would also spend less time on other things which are not important so that I would have time to complete it fully.

Overall, I have learnt a lot of new techniques from this module and now have a wider knowledge within 3DS Max.

Face - UVW Mapping

I have attempted to do the UVW mapping, however everytime I click on the cylindrical tool and the 'Align Y' button, I seem to have a weird green line on my neck and on the side of my face. So this mucked up the rest of what was meant to happen!

Face - Attached Ear & Finished Eyeballs

Woo! Finally finished attaching the ear to the head. It all looks very smooth on the join, side and back of the ear. This was achieved by simply creating more polygons in order to get more points so that everything could join up on both the head and the ears using the 'create' tool. (Thanks to Luke for the help guiding me on the back of the ear as I kept finding it hard to see the points and kept getting confused with where the points were meant to snap to!)

I am very pleased with the outcome of the face! I am going to attempt to try the mapping part, however I don't think I will get that finished in time, but I will still have a go and post up what I have managed to get done.

Face - Finished Ear

The ear has been completed, all that needs to happen now is to attach the ear to my face.

In order to create the deep 'dip' in the ear, this was simply achieved by using the 'inset' tool. This made extra edges which were than pulled into the direction of the inside of the ear, resulting in a more shapely appearance. I felt this made the ear a lot more realistic since it gave different depths within the inside of the ear.

Although the ear wasn't particularly easy to model, I didn't think it was as hard as people made out. I am quite pleased with how the ear turned out as well, it seems to match my ear pretty accurately shape wise...

Face - Stage 8 - Ear Creation

A topology was done for the ear, and from here I began to model. The process for making the ear is the same process as when making the face. (Drawing out the grids using the line tool making sure everything snaps in place, then dragging the points to where they should be positioned to match the ear etc).

I had a slight problem after I had made the simple outlines of my ear, as you can see there was a hole in it...

I realised the reason that I had this hole was because I had a polygon that had 6 sides, so this was fixed by dividing that polygon into 2 four sided ones instead.

Face - Finished Head

I have finally finished modelling the whole head - what a relief! I came across various problems during this stage, the big problem was having trouble with the points. Basically I had too many polygons and some had nothing to join to when snapping/attaching together the face to the head. This meant I had to go through deleting the edges/verticies which weren't needed (those that had nothing to attach to) so that I could snap all the points together with the face. I thought this would result in a less smooth/rounded head on the sides, however it seemed that it made not much difference and in fact it had actually made my head appear with less 'ripples' when rendered.

Face - Stage 7

The next part of the face modelling was to make the head shape including the neck. This involved using a sphere shape for the base of the head, and then editing the shape by dragging out the edges and the vertices on the side and front view to the correct positions, so that everything comes out smooth and not all flat. The soft selection tool was used to align and snap the top of the sphere shape to the forehead, so that they all connected.

I found this stage to be quite difficult too as I had to guess the shape of my head since my hair was covering it up in the photo, so the shape of my head is just a rough outline and may not be correct, however I matched it up as close as possible. Also, the main problem for this stage being difficult is because the man teaching us this tutorial doesn't actually tell us how to do it, so it's all guess work! But I think it's going okay for the moment.

The process of me modelling the head so far...

Face - Stage 6

Stage 6 consisted of editing the nose and adding in the lips.

By adding more quads to the nose (creating copies by selecting the edges that follow around the outside of the nostrils and holding shift at the same time), we are able to complete the shape. To do this we drag the edges and vertices about to make the nostril and realistic as possible. Using the 'connect' tool, this also enables a more flowing structure by adding additional geometry all around.

Firstly I had a very big problem when it came to changing my nose as I didn't have enough sides on the nostril to get the exact shape, size and position. So at the moment I have very tiny nostrils, but I will hopefully be able to fix this later on. If not then that is the best I can get it to look.

The lips however went more smoothly, following the same process when editing the nose. I feel this turned out looking far more realistic than my nose! So I am pleased with the outcome of this.

I also managed to fix the little bumps around the eyes a bit so it didn't look as 'dented' in as it did before.

Face - Stage 5

Stage 5 of the face modelling was a simple tutorial to follow through. The process was basically adding the other half of the face by using the 'symmetry' modifier, this then mirrored the left side of the face to complete the right side. The other task was to simply make the face appear smoother looking, and there were 3 different ways to do this.

-Using the NURMS subdivison tool

-Using TurboSmooth modifier

-Using MeshSmooth

All three resulted in pretty much the same smoothness and appearance, however I chose to use the TurboSmooth modifier as this created a better finish. The other two choices were useful also, however, I found that both created a stronger line down the middle of my face, whereas the TurboSmooth gave a fainter one.

I feel that my face is going pretty well, there are adjustments to be made to the nose and near the eyes (there are slight bumps which doesn't look good!) but I will do this at later stages.

I have to say, the side of the face actually looks quite like me (even though the perspective view makes me look EXTREMELY like a gorilla! Quite funny though - made me laugh quite a bit...), but from looking at the front, you can see that my face is a bit on the thin side and needs to be a bit 'fatter'!

I have also found that my face is actually quite symmetrical though as the mouth and eyes are nicely in line with the picture! That's interesting to know.

Face - Stages 3 & 4

Stage 3 involved aligning the pictures together making sure they were both in the correct place using 3DS Max, as shown above. Firstly I had to create a plane and add my picture (jpeg) into the material editor, then drag onto the plane. At first I had trouble with importing my image in because only my front view showed up and the side was missing, but I retried it again after several attempts and for some reason it worked correctly.
This stage consisted of a lot of editing of the picture, such as rotating and resizing my picture so that it would fit onto the plane. This wasn't to say that it was difficult however, just time consuming as I had to keep redoing it several times since some parts were wrong. Lastly I had to rotate the second plane (side picture) so that it was 90 degrees and placed in the right position next to the front view.

Stage 4 involved drawing on the grids in 3DS Max using the line tool. This was a tedious process as I had to make sure that the lines all snapped together when being joined, otherwise problems would arise later on (which did in fact happen, twice!). This was due to the points not joining as the corners/points didn't snap together, so when it came to weilding them, some parts were separate and not wielded! However, after several attempts of redoing the whole lines again, I managed to fix this problem and moved onto actually creating the structures of my face by dragging the points on the side view to the appropriate places in order to define my face shape. Again, this is proving quite difficult, especially once it gets to the eyes as the lines start to overlap each other making it very confusing to see what I'm actually doing.

Below shows what it looks like once this part has been completed.

Final YMCA Storyboard

The final idea for the YMCA promotion has been discussed as a group and been drawn into a rough storyboard, shown below.

Adjustments to Final Idea

We have now come to a final conclusion now and have changed the final idea slightly. What has been changed is that we are now doing characters in a different form; they will be in the form of silhouettes instead of 3D models now. The reason for this was because we felt the silhouette idea would be perfect to use as it fits in with the current YMCA design, found on their website (Chelmsford) under the 'youth' section. We also felt that this would work better as it would mean we do not have to model any specific personality, so people will not be put off by whatever clothing or hairstyles they have - this is because some people may think they have to be a certain type of person to fit in, and so this may prevent them from joining. However, the silhouettes could still have different styles to them to emphasise that they are entering a room which will match the mood of the activity. For example, one silhouette could be 'gothic' or 'emo' once they enter the Rock School activity.

Each member will have 1 activity each to model, and in total there will be 4 rooms (4 activities).

The order of rooms that the character will go to are:-

1) Nursery - Lisa

2) Baddow Youth Club - Maria

3) Rock School - Luke

4) Y Club - Rich