At this point Im feeling quite happy with the progress of my work, even though it has kind of taken over everything else I'm doing because of the 5 week deadline just to get it finished in time, but I'm determined not to get bogged behind by bugs in 3DS Max and hopefully finish it and hand it in before the deadline. So far I feel I have learnt a great deal just going through this in the last 3/4 weeks that it really is going to benefit me in future, I will definately move on to more complex projects within 3d max in future and I hope to produce high quality rendered reproductions of vehicles, people and buildings.
Moving back onto the task in hand, One item you may have seen lurking in my scene which I have not mentioned as of yet is the eyeballs. Well I took the liberty of creating the eyeballs while I had a free day to mess around and experiment, I thought they would add to the detail and character of this creation. But the eyeballs really were very simple and quick to create, I did not document them at the time hence why the explanation has been left til now but as it was so quick to make them, i will recreate them in Max using screenshots from now.
So the first step is to create a 3d shape - Sphere
Draw your sphere onto your stage, remember this will be an eyeball, so not too big, the radius on mine is 5.052 as this ended up being the perfect size for fitting into the eye gap and 32 segments (which was just the default here, I didn't change anything to get that).
Above is the sphere I have created, now for the material editor, enter into your material editor and click the little box next to the 'Diffuse' option, then click onto bitmap:
Now Im going to use an image from the file archives of max here because it is a default image that I used, I was actually quite blessed because I searched the Image files online and found it quick difficult to find what would make a good material for a brown eye, but in the archives there just happened to be a brown eyeball texture, so i used that, the directory on the computer i was using was
C:\Autodesk\3ds max 9\Maps\Organics
and the filename was eyeball_spherical.jpg
Drag and drop this map onto your eyeball, thankfully this all seemed to match up and look pretty natural for me, but if you need to change size or position, you need to add a UVW Map to edit these factors.
Also in material editor, I believed that some extra detail could be put inot the eyeball, so I changed the Specular level to 332 and the Glossiness to 78. Also using a bump map of the same image just lets the eyeball protrude a little from the surface such as a real eyeball does, here is a final glimpse (no pun intended) of the eyeball as it stands now
Once you are happy with the eyeball, hold down shift with the eyeball selected and drag it away to clone it and just move them into place on the inside of the face.
Here is the render with eyeballs in:
Creating the ear
The start of the detail, now this is where I started to find it getting a bit tricky for my liking as the furhter you progress, the more difficult it seems to be, but none the less, I was up for a challenge so on we go with it.
Creating the ear involves you getting back into photoshop at the topology stage again, but this time with your ear. If you roughly follow the lines of your ear, remember the golden rule, keep everything four sided. here is the example I end up with after some time in Photoshop, again, do this on another layer so you can rub out if you need to and use your original reference planes so you can just 'reload' the image later on the max material like I went over earlier.
As you can see I've tried to flow with the lines of the easr as much as possible, this makes it easier for you in max if you spend some time here trying to get it right. Now the next step is to get this image back onto our reference planes in photoshop and start drawing around the lines with the line tool much like we did in the beginning with the vertices of our face.
As you can see, I've already grouped the objects together here because they're all the same colour, it may also help as I found out to hide the rest of the scene apart from the ear & reference plane to save yourself some hassle when you're drawing out the points. When you draw out the points in front of your reference plane, make sure you're either in left/right view and not Perspective/User etc. Also make sure that your reference plane is still frozen.
So here I have converted the flat 2d line creation into a 3d poly, made it see through and started pulling out some vertices to give it some shape, this is much like the procedure we followed to create the face, pull out the vertices to each reference point as best as possible and try to recreate your ear in 3d Max, tricky but not impossible to make it look good:
Below are some more screen shots following what lengths it took me to create the final thing, it will give you a good idea of the measures that I took to produce this, the tricky parts were using the chamfer function to create the deep crevice inside the ear and also trying to model the top part of the inside of the ear;
Topology stages of pulling the vertices out to give it some shape from a flat object
This was me getting ahead opf myself pulling down the inner parts of the ear before Eric had mentioned it, I though it would be a good idea but it actually made it trickier for myself meaning I had to delete these objects before I connected the ear
Fine adjustment of the last vertices to connect together
Rotating some selected vertices at the top of the ear to define some of the lines, didn't work as I had hoped but looked ok I feel.
Final view of the back of the ear
Final ear turbosmoothed
Turbosmoothed, but with see through turned off.
Overall I was happy with the bottom part of the ear but i feel the top part of the ear lacks deifinition, I tried my best to define some extra lines in by cuttin in extra edges but my attempt failed, also knowing I had only got just over a week left on this project I didn't want to spend too long on the ear when I felt I could possibly leave it like it was, so I decided to carry on at this point.
Connecting the Ear
Here is where Eric Maslowski's video is not the most helpful because I would say this was probably one of the more trickier moments of creating a head in 3d max, connecting the ear proved to be time consuming , awkward and not explained to us very well. On the plus side, I'd say it taught me patience and anger management techniques! It also helped me learn how to connect an ear to a head in 3ds Max with not much help, anyhow, to start with, after watching the tutorial, I decided to give it some effort in the way he showed us but not having much joy, what i decided to do was turn off the symmetry view and just have half the head showing at the time so I could view the hole in the head from the other side.
The view above gives you a view from the outside, the hole in the head has a similar shape but not the same and more importantly, a different number of vertex points. My advice if you're doing this is to create the erxact number of vertex points around the hole in the head as there are around the back of the ear so that you can target weld the points to each other. The tricky bit is trying to see what you're connecting together, but this is the view I used:
and eventually with my best efforts connected the ear.
Next is a screenshot after I had connected the ear, because the problem I got after I rendered it was that everything looked stretched around the ear, so I cut in some more edges to flow down the side of the head to take away that stretched look that pulling the vertices around had created
My advice to anyone following this is to just have patience and know that it will be worth it in the end.
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