18. I work further on the palm and thumb connection point. As this will be the model to be sculpted in ZBrush later, it's important to maintain an equal size of polygons. The only areas of the hand that need more numerous and smaller polygons are the joints, wrist and perhaps the fingertips (Fig.18a – Fig.18b).



19. Select the edge loops that make up the joints of the fingers and thumb – two around each finger, and one on the thumb; right-click over the model and hit the little icon next to the Chamfer button. Selecting the Chamfer text will use the default settings without popping up a menu box, whereas we want to click the icon so we can dictate those settings ourselves.

Increase the size of the Chamfer to approximately the size in the second screenshot here (Fig19a – Fig.19b), and increase the number of segments to 2. Now we have created optimal topology for our finger joints that will also deform well.



20. After doing small tweaks on the model throughout this entire process, some of the centre line vertices have been moved off centre. The welding no longer matches up and a clear seam is visible. To get this back to an accurate state go to the Editable Poly level of your model and press [3] on your keyboard, or select the Edge Borders sub-selection mode. Click once on one of the edges on the centreline and Max will select the whole loop.

With the loop selected, in the modifier panel find the Make Planar button. On the right of the button are three letters corresponding to the various axes. These buttons take the current selection and line every vertex up in the chosen axis. As the symmetry modifier is in the X plane, we can go ahead and select the X icon. You should see the edges line up as you click. We are not quite done, because the lining up averaged all the vertex locations and now they all lie in that position. Again in the co-ordinates input boxes along the bottom of the screen, type zero in the X box. This puts all the vertices back along the X axis and our symmetry modifier works once again (Fig.20a & Fig.20b).




21. Finally, it's time to work on the head again, and we start by blocking in the eye areas. If the eye holes are in the right place it makes it very easy to locate the nose, mouth, and ear (Fig.21).