Cut and Style:
I personally think that this is one of the most important things to do with this new face count. Before we had only a small number of different hair styles that could be done in the face count we had, which was a little problem because hair adds so much to the character of a model. You are able to change the complete feel of a character with a different hair cut.
We will use opacity map to do the hair. A real good example of this done well is in Dead or Alive 3. They had a few more polys than we do for this character but we are going to use the same technique.
We will start with facial hair. You what to select the edges you want the hair to come from, hold Shift Key and drag these faces out (this is known as shift copying faces.) The reason I shift copy these faces and not just make planes and attach them is so you can line the texture from the texture on the face to the texture on these opacity mapped polys. After we have shift copied these face just move the vertices around so that the plane lay above each other, but don’t cut through each other.
I going to try something I haven’t done before, the only reason I haven’t done this before is that I haven’t had this kind of face count to work with before (it also help a lot that he doesn’t have that much hair.) Make a cylinder for the hair band of the character (remember to always optimize the values of the cylinder, for this I used an 8 sided cylinder with no height segments.) Now make a new cylinder that just fits inside the last one, delete the top and bottom faces. Now select the top row of vertices of the second cylinder (you will need to make it an edit mesh) scale them up about 20%, now attach the two cylinders. Element selected the second cylinder and scale it down. Then select the top row of this new element and pull the vertices out just above the other elements top row of vertices. Do this a number of times, as shown below.
Place the hair on the head and we are done. That is the head pretty much done; we need to do some optimizing and refining the mesh. Now I’m going to make the neck to help me to see how the jaw and some other places of the head should look.
The Neck:
The neck is one area that can have a bit more detail than you would with a lower polys count model. You should now add the two muscles that run from you coaler bone to behind your ears (this may not be as prominent on a more realistic model.) Also the Adams Apple for your male characters.
Start by making a cylinder and then converting it to an editable mesh. Delete one side of the cylinder (neck) place it about were the neck will fit into head. With the head selected go to you create panel Compound Object and then select Boolean from the menu. From the Boolean roll out click the Pick Operand B, then click on the half cylinder and select Union from the Boolean roll out (One tip with Boolean you want all edges visible on your model when you do a Boolean, Max will some times turn the invisible edges if this is not done.) Convert to Editable mesh, delete the second side of the head and recopy it (the instance has been reset.) Optimize the Boolean. Then by dividing and turning edges and moving vertices around, add detail to the neck.
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Brendan George BrendanDoord@hotmail.com
Mid-Poly Modelling
09/2002