Week 9 - Continuing the Head

This week i wanted to focus on finishing the Face, this included the mouth bag, complete with tongue and teeth. To do this, i had to really utilise the duplicate tool and use it to its full potential.

To start, seeing as i intended to have the model's face as symmetrical as possible, till the end, i cut the model in half so i could see the inside of the mouth easier while i build it. I decided that this would be easier than constantly hiding and showing the mouth, as i could always have the face on reference  to line up the teeth with the jaw.
Here are the teeth that i created, following the Lynda tutorial, i found this build much easier than i thought it would be. i began with a polygon donuts and cut it in half, and then cut off the top half of the faces, i then made a box and scaled it down to fit the size of the gum ,i then extruded into the box, to make a basic teeth shape. I wasn't really concerned about going into insane detail with the teeth, as it not would have fit the style of the character, but also it would be barely visible. i was more interested in the technique of how to build teeth, Once i have built the teeth, i used the recommendation of the Lynda tutorial of using the duplicate special too to  create a row of teeth the same as the last, i duplicate the teeth along a pivot point As this creates an 'instance' relationship among the teeth, once I edit one tooth, the exact same edits are made to the other teeth.Along the gums, I selected every other edge to create gums, and moved them down to create a zig zag pattern so that the gums were just a boring straight line with no geometry. I then scaled the gums up to fit the teeth inside, Gave the Gums and teeth a parent-child relationship, by the last object selected becoming the child. This was beneficial as then the gums follow the edits made to the teeth and stay in proportion to them.
Once i had made the teeth and gums, i duplicate special the side of the face, so that the face was once again complete. In addition to this, i also cut a hole in between the lips, so that the mouth inside was actually invisible, and so that during the animating of the character the mouth would perform how a real mouth would. Notice the seam along the centre of the face, that will be removed when i combine the two face halves together.



Once i was happy with everything i had done previously, i then went on to make the tongue and mouth bag. Following the Lynda tutorial, the tongue itself was very straight forward. i created a box, deleted the rear of the box, and created a divot in the tongue, followed by rounding off the tongue front to make it look less like a box. And that was it for the tongue, i then extruded inwards from the lips for the mouth bag, yet despite this, what seems to be a very easy part of the build, i had some problems with its construction, as it would constantly overlap with the outside of the face. Once i have solved this issue by scaling donw the teeth so i could make the mouth bag smaller, i closed the bag by merging all the verts with the "Merge to centre" tool, this however created a few triangles at the back of the mouth, but seeing as i couldn't find another solution around this problem, i left it as, the triangles at the back of the mouth do no effect any geometry that is in face visible, and therefore will not effect the topology, and animation capabilities of the model itself.




Once i has done this, i then moved onto the penultimate part of the body, the ears. following a tutorial i found on YouTube (Linked below). While they looked very complicated and i had no idea where to begin, i found the tutorial i followed to be very intuitive and easy to follow,  the process involved creating a polygon plane and extruding to create the loops of the ears. Once this was done, fill in the gaps and then extrude down  to create depth and bring the ear into look real, it also created the ear drum hole, which i thought was a nice touch.

This is the ear once extruded down, to create the back of the ears, i merely did the same as how i made the sleeves on the jumper, by extruding backwards and then back inwards towards the centre of the ear.
To attach the ears, i cut a hole in the side of the ear, and combined the mesh of the two models, then i used the merge to centre tool to merge the verts together, so that the model was no longer in two pieces. the ear has more verts along the edge of the ear, than the hole in the side of the face, so to combat this, i just created edge loops where the verts would connect, so that no triangles would be created in the process.
With the ears attached, the face of my Character was completed and i could begin on the hair of the model!
I researched how to created hair, this included created what is known as NURB curves, however, this style of hair did not match how i wanted my hair to look. Other approaches included, downloading an official Arnold plug in for my maya software. This would create actual hairs on my model, and while this would have been very cool looking, The amount of GPU power required to host this, would have caused a Mac to crash, and in addition to this. it would have not fit the style of my character. In the end i decided i would make the hair out of regular polygons, and add a hair texture with the painting process.

 Ear Tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcYrUHRIqsE&t=59s


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