As with the body, the modelling of the head began with the image planes being set up (Fig.06). Once again the trusty poly cube came into play for the modelling aspect. Again, a few splits and tweaks and the head began to take shape. I tended to have a ‘gung ho’ moment and just went for broke cutting in the nasal labial and the lower lip area with one big loop; it helped me establish where I was going to place the rest of my edgeloops that would follow from the eyes and nose and the rest of the mouth. It looks jumbled right now and the geometry has more than just quads, but not for much longer…
Fig.06
It was time to start getting organised by getting the ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of the mesh to line up and get rid of the junk. The geometry was now clean enough now to begin creating more details for the eyes, lips and nose. Edges were extruded for the nose tip and connected via the philtrum, followed by filling the hole where the nostrils would be and splitting the geometry to shape it up before extruding for the actual nostril, and then more extrudes for the nasal holes. The lip area was pretty straight forward: by selecting the edges and extruding inwards toward the mouth cavity, I gave the lips the initial form, and then by adding extra loops, they were tweaked until they matched the sketches.
Ear We Go!:
Probably the most tedious and one of the most difficult parts of any character head is modelling the ears (Fig.07). Well, I like to think I have this down quite well these days, as I prefer to use a method I learned about 3 years ago that incorporates a technique used on the Freedom of Teach DVD using 8 polys from the side of your characters head. Yes, 8 polys. Faces are extruded, deleted and also spun using the spinFaces.mel (available at Highend3d.com).
Fig.07
Hair Creation:
For this exercise I chose to create a hair cap from a poly plane, and then began to shape it up in the side viewport (Fig.08). Following on, the hair was then shaped to fit the head. The hair strands were added from either extruding faces along a nurbs curve or simply extruding a face and shaping it.
Fig.08
Final Details:
Instead of using bump or displacement maps, the forehead creases and areas around the chin were physically cut and shaped onto the model; the same was done in the production of Headcases. Eyebrows were created and formed using our friend and saviour, the polycube. I also added a little asymmetry to the brows as with the face to get a more characterised expression even in the default state (Fig.09).
