I'm James Taylor, let's model this head in Maya.
We'll focus on the face area, most and most notably the eye region and the
mouth region where the most animation happens. And to do that, we'll define our topology along
these lines. As I did with the body, I'm modeling on top of
Image Planes. I've lined them up using my guidelines. The big
difference is, we need these to match up as closely as possible. So we really have to take
time to nitpick. You'll see that already have a place holder head I
created, based on the previous reference. This
will make matching the scale between my old reference and my new reference much easier.
So I import the new reference, and match it to the
block out head, and in Maya 2015 I can just use my move / rotate
/ scale tools to do this. I'll switch the side camera to a 'Right' view, and
import the image plane. I mentioned with the image planes that precision
is very important on the head. So I'm double checking that I've got a match
between my image planes, by using polygon planes to just create
comparison points. Now, once that's handled, we start modeling, and
I will start with a cylinder. I'll place it over the eye, and give it 12
subdivisions on its axis, and 2 subdivisions on its
cap. And then I'll delete all the faces except for the top
cap. So, it's positioned over the eye, in both the front
and side views. And then I'll duplicate it and move
it over the mouth. These two cylinder caps are the basis for our
head. Let's look at the mouth. I'll grab that inner ring of
verts. And that will represent the outer edges of
the lips. and then this outer ring is going to represent the
shape of the laugh line, and a lot of the animation
points around the mouth. This topology is built with animation in mind. Think
about that wireframe we looked at back at the
very beginning: those are the two sets of radial muscles that
we're creating right now. With the lips, I'll get rid of these two sets of
triangle edges, so I'm left with that middle edge and then I'll use Multi-Cut to connect straight up
and down So I'm creating these straight lines from top to
bottom, and basically I've got 3 rows of verts: the top lip, the middle of the lips, and the bottom
lip. Now I want to start positioning these. This
second row is very close to the center - I need to
move it in and on the top lip, that vert sits higher than the
center point. This is going to create that divot for
the philtrum. I'll tweak the center row, so that it follows the
middle line of the lips. I'll tweak the bottom row a
little bit But this 3rd row over here usually needs to come
in a little bit closer than that, then I'll have to adjust
it to match the reference in that area. I'll tilt the corner of the mouth down a little bit,
that's a very standard posture Then I'll look at the lips in the side view. And that
middle row comes all the way forward to the
extents for the lip on the side view. Similarly, I can pull this vert forward, to right
under the nose. This vert comes forward, it's
right on the corner of the nose and that will help guide me in positioning the rest
of these. The outside ring is the laugh line, and it sticks
very close to the mouth when we get down to
this lower portion. Now, the 2nd row placement is extremely crucial. It's almost as far forward as the center row, and
in the side view, we can see how close they are
together, make sure you have that kind of relationship
between the first and second row. The 3rd row comes forward, and this outer
corner is easy to place, because we'll have the
corner of the mouth very visible in the side view. Now I can start to tweak positions. So we'll bring
in the outer edges of lips to match the reference, and this part should be pretty easy, because
we're very literally matching the outlines of the
lips here, Now with the middle of the lips, I'll generally
position those verts in the perspective view. Because I need to push them both back, and
inwards towards the center of the mouth. And then I'll select these edges and Connect
Components to add another row in here. And I can use my
Transform Components tool to push these rows
out, so that they inflate and that gives us a lot of the roundness that we
need in the lip area. And we can place those rows in the side view
pretty accurately. Now we're left with some
triangles in the corner of the mouth. I'll collapse those to get rid of it. And then I'll
switch to my smooth proxy mode (hit the 3 key),
to make a few adjustments to the mouth. Then its time to move on to the eyes. We'll start
with the inner ring on the eyes, and that matches
the edges of the eyeballs. We can just line it up to the whites of the eye in
our front view. And similar to what I did with the lips, I connect
straight up and down. Then I'll look at the side
view, and when we're placing the verts in the side
view, the center comes all the way forward to the
center of the eyeball. And you can find the outer
corner most easily, and we just split the difference between those 2
rows. Now the inside of the eye, we can't see from the
side view. We'll have to place that from the
perspective view. The inside corner of the eye does not go as far
back as the outside corner of the eye. Ok, this outer ring is the ocular orbit - the bone
that surrounds the eye. The upper portion of this is the easiest to define,
we just trace along the eyebrow above the eye. The lower portion sits close to the eye, and then
when we place it in the side view, we again line it
up based on those eyebrows, that'll make things pretty easy to find. Now the verts of this
row that are on the inside of eye, those sit on the
side of the nose, and the verts on the outside sit very close to the
eyeball, so there's not much distance there. And then the lower verts I'll just move forward a
little bit. I'll hit the 3 key to smooth the eye, same as I did
with the mouth. I'll grab the edges around the eye and use my Crease tool to crease them. And that
will give me a sharper shape, and I'll tweak that a
little bit. And now I'll cut in a row very close around the
eye, using my Insert Edge Loop tool. This is the
eyelid. We can match it to our reference pretty easily, by
looking for the pink around the eye, and placing
this row accordingly. I'll cut in another edge using Insert Edge Loop,
and this traces along the outside of the eye,
where the eyelid folds back into the skin of the face. This
line is pretty easy to find on the reference, it's that dark line that overlaps the top of the
eyeball. The bottom part? Not so important. Now for the nose, I make another cylinder, I tilt it
up the same way I did before. This one has 8
subdivision axis. We'll place it around the nose in the front view,
and we want to make sure that it matches up to
the outside edge of the nostril and the bottom of the nose. And I'll pull this middle
set of rows forward, I'm starting to create the
depth of the nose. I delete the interior edges, and Connect in such a
way that I end up with four faces here. Now I can add some volume into the bulb of the
nose. I'll subdivide down the bottom front, pull that
forward. And now the shape of the nose is really starting
to take form I'll make this connection down in the corner here.
Just connecting these two verts. This will be
important later on. Right now, I'll grab these edges at the top, and
extrude them back to create the bridge of the
nose. And we'll snap that outer point there to the
corresponding point on the eye area. This is
where we start to merge these together. Now I'll grab these edges on the bulb of the nose,
and I'll connect them Now we turn that area into some quads. And it's
also defining more of the bottom of the nose. I'll add a point to this triangle here, this is going to
be a very important quad. This is the corner of the nose that meets the
laugh line. So the mouth will attach here. Now I Smooth the nose, and start building the
nostril. Remember, you can see the nostril in the
side view. The bottom of the nose isn't flat! So I'll just Extrude - I'll inset a face on the corner
there. And I'll position that nostril hole in the front
and side views, and I'll also start to position the septum.
Remember, it's very narrow, we can see it in the
side view. Then I make some changes to the shape, it's
easier to connect things up when they're not
smoothed. Then I'll grab that face, the nostril, and extrude it
up and inwards, to create the negative space
that I need. Now comes the fun part: combining and blending
these different areas together. I'll start with the
nose and mouth. I'll move the mouth out of the way. And then I
want to look at the topology on the nose: I have
these 3 verts, to just 2 verts on the mouth side. I'll cut in a new set of edges using my Multi Cut,
that'll become the philtrum. And I can merge these
verts together. So far, so good! I'll cut another row horizontally across the top of
the mouth and I'll subdivide it in such a way that
I'm basically adding a whole other row there. And I can snap that new vert that I just added to
the edge of the nose. Now I can extrude straight
out from the corner of the nose there, this will be the fold that really helps us to define
the laugh line. You'll see I'm taking time to place it
very carefully. I continue that line downward by extruding from the sides of the laugh line and the
mouth area, and then I'll select under the chin and
extrude down. I'll start to to build out the mass of the chin here.
We'll see that I have to subdivide in the actual
chin and pull those edges out create the volume of the
chin. That leaves me with some un-terminated
edges. What I'll do is just continue those back - I'll cut
along this point. And then I grab this edge and
extrude all the way back. And this is going to define my jaw. I'll move it all the way back to the corner right
under the ear, where the ear and the jaw meet, to
define my jaw line. Then I'll extrude straight up, and hit right above
the ear. And I'll add a couple of subdivisions in there, so that I can shape it better from the
front view. Now I'll extrude that entire edge forward. I'll have
to cut a subdivision into the jaw to match that up, so my topology will fit. But now
I'm defining more of the cheek area using my front and side reference. So we need
to fill this area in, and I'm not going to continue
from the jaw. Instead, I'll grab the edges under the eye. I extrude those out in a radial fashion, so my main
concern right now is transitioning between the eye and the nose area. I'll Weld that vert at the
top of the eye and nose area, and I'll move this set of faces in such a way that I
can now merge that vert to the nose. And then I
use Fill Hole, and now I can start to merge to the outside cheek area.I'll just flatten that row of
verts, so it'll be easier to integrate into the rest of
the cheek. next on grab the edges coming out the mouth, like
I did before, and just extrude again. I'll start by Connecting the bottom-most extrusion.
I'll just Bridge across to the corresponding face.
Then I'll do these 2 diagonal bridges. I deleted that one face there, to make things
easier, and I'll massage my verts around a little bit I want to spread them out, that'll make it easier to
control both the anatomy and the topology, before
I start filling other holes in. I'll start down here on the chin: I'll cut it another
set of rows, and just merge those two sets of
verts. I'm basically continuing that laugh line and all the
way around, so it goes from the side of the nose, all the way
under the mouth. That leaves me with this
obvious hole on the jaw. I can just use Fill Hole there. And now I have
these two empty areas that I have to fill in, on the
cheek. I start by grabbing these two edges on the cheek,
and then Collapsing them together, which will turn that 5 sided opening into a 4 sided
face that we can easily fill. Now I'm gonna take care of this area above the
nose - this is a pretty critical area. I'll pull this vert up and to the left, and I see that
now I've got 2 edges that I can Bridge together to
create a nice quad in that region. So everything is connected, but we've got some triangles here. So I'll collapse a few edges, we'll see that if the collapse them the way I just did, we get rid of all the triangles, we're left with only quads. And now we're in the situation where we need to move our verts around to create proper anatomy. But - I get some lumpiness here, because of the double set of edges I created to define the laugh line, and that double row is important for animation, but it's not working here. So I'll select this edge ring, and then collapse all those edges together. Now I'll cut in these extra edges under the nose, because I need some of the detail that I had before, I'll Collapse that extra edge, and then I'll just take that vert up in the corner and merge it up to the neighbor to the top left. And now our topology is mostly done, so it's time to tweak to match the likeness. I'm paying very close attention to my reference, to try match things up, for example, I'm double checking the placement on the eyelids. The upper eyelid isn't far forward enough, and I have to cut in another set of subdivisions on the eyelid here, so that I can push that up and back, to create the area were the eyelid folds back on itself. And now I'll turn to the corner of the lip, and I'm trying capture that depth of the fold fold that's in that region. So I continue that line from the nose down, and I'll bring it in to a point, because I'm not going to deal with the topology yet. Then I'll tweak those two verts outside the corner of the mouth to create that overlap and that fold in that area. And you'll see that my camera is going crazy all over the place because I need to view this from as many
possible views to see what the shape is looking like. So when you're modeling, you should never have your camera static when you're trying to capture a likeness. We need to move the camera around, to see your object in 3D from as many angles as possible. Here I'm grabbing edges in the center of the lips, and using my Crease tool. And now when I crease these verts, they'll hold their position a little bit better than they did before. This will help capture that fold in that corner of the mouth. One thing that I haven't mentioned is that we need to be deleting history on our meshes regularly. So: Edit > Delete by Type > History to get rid of all the construction history on my object and that can help with performance. OK, now I'll connect some edges down at the bottom here, I'm creating some diagonal edges. Then I'll select the diagonals going in the opposite direction and delete them. I end up with quads, that resolves the triangle under the cheek. Next I'm going to refine this area. This particular area is going to be really important for capturing the likeness, so and I'll play around with the subdivisions in here, and I'll cut in some extra subdivisions, so I can continue the line from the cheek area down into the jaw. That'll allow me to round out the chin a little bit more, and also cleans up our topology just a little bit. But we are left with some triangles that we wanna get rid of. So I'll cut diagonally down like that and I'll select this edge, and collapse it, and then I'll collapse the edge above it, and delete the remaining triangle edge now. Now I'll turn my attention to the forehead, I'll start with a radial extrusion from the eyebrow area we'll see that merge that there, I'll just extrude the rest of these out regularly, spread the mouth in the Mao and the no grab the edge and the center here, and extrude that straight over, merging together to the bridge of the nose Now I can just take all the edges on the top and extrude them straight up, and reposition them and match to my reference Then I'll extrude up again, so I can get more of the curvature of the shape. Then I spend a lot of time massaging verts, so they are evenly distributed, the forehead should be a very smooth area. Now it's time to focus on the likeness. I'll combine the two halves of my head together,
and merge the verts together in the center. And you'll note that I have a bunch of edges creased (that's what those bold edges are) you might want to try that depending on what your character looks like. Now that the topology is done I can go through and make tweaks to the mesh without having to worry about the topology. So I'm looking very carefully at my reference, you'll see how closely zoomed in I am, in both of the orthographic views. Right now, for example I'm creating that upward motion under the lips to create the shadowing that I see there. And now I'm working on the nose to broaden that a little bit. Next, I create a sphere for the skull. And I'll choose a sphere that has about the same number of subdivisions as my head Then I'll snap points up to the forehead, to match it up. And once that's in place, I can adjust the size of it, but we want to remember that the skull is bigger in the rear of the skull, than it is at the front. So it tapers to the front a little bit. And then I can just extrude straight down and add a few subdivisions to rounds things out. That's about all the detail we need for the head. Now the ear is another cylinder cap and I'll just match it up in the side view. And I'll connect the ear on these verts here. We'll see that the ear sits flush with the cheek. And I'll extrude it backwards. Remember that it's not even when we extrude it backwards. Now I can delete these faces on the head, and extrude out from the corresponding faces on the ear then I'll take those resulting faces and snap them to the head. And those points that merge together to create the whole shape and Now I'll do some more asymmetry tweaking: I move the eyes and the nose to match the reference better. I do this last because in case I need to make large structural changes to my mesh, it'll still be symmetrical, and therefore easy to change. I'll make changes in the brow region I'll make that chin more asymmetrical, the brow protrudes a little bit too much, so I'll push that back in We end up with this, which is a passable likeness. And now the modeling phase is done, and I can move to next steps I'm going to tackle UV mapping and unwrapping next. I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching
Another absolutely brilliant tutorial. How do you set it so that what you do to one side of the nose is mirrored on the other? Also how do you set the mesh to be wireframe in the front and side views but filled out in the perspective? Thanks in advance for your help!
Good tutorial! A very good teacher. I had no idea Littlefinger did Maya tutorials. =)
Amazing tutorial! Absolutely helped me with my modeling.
This is an amazing tutorial but I have a question, whenever I ask for critique on my projects from this subreddit people always say to never model based on the smooth model. However, you seem to do that a lot.