Construction of the Nostrils

As tempting as it was to create a nose-based pun for the title (And believe me, I was not short of ideas!), the need to explain the construction process surpassed the desire for weak humour.

A really quick set of nostrils were created to give me a vague idea of what everything should look like. Amazingly, the turbosmooth performed an exceptional job and created a pretty clean nostril. There was still a ton of room for tweaking (As this looks more like a beak than a nose), but a promising start!

The trickiest part here was creating the 'fold' of the nostrils, the part where it 'bumps' out from the skin, displaying a noticeable groove. My nasal 'folds' (whatever the term for it is) are quite prominent, which didn't help the situation much either. Creating a 'tear drop' shape for the nostrils also proved quite challenging. What made this part considerably difficult was the fact that you had to zoom in quite close, and were confronted with so many vertices that it was difficult to see which ones you had to pull. That said, everything was slowly coming together bit-by-bit

Pinching was once again a bit of a problem, considering the cluster of vertices grouped together so closely. I also had to pull vertices behind each other to create the 'fold' effect, which in turn pinched some of the textures. Little handy tip for everyone else though: If you use one view-port to edit, you can use another to see the final effects. Using the above image as an example; you can edit in the right-hand view port, and observe changes on the right side of the face in the top-left viewport (I specify the right side, because this doesn't shows the vertices when you edit, so you can see a clean, finished form move as you edit, which helps greatly and prevents you from having to make a chance and constantly zooming out and de-selecting everything.

And here's the final result of the nose. There's still a bit of work that needs doing, but it's certainly coming along nicely. As before, I decided to leave it for now and edit as I come back to incorporate the other elements of the face (I find that if you leave things like this and come back later, it's easier to spot solutions and problematic bumps a lot easier than if you've been sitting and staring at it for several hours). Already right now, several hours after creating the screenshot, I can see an immediate solution to 'largen' the nasal fold. A break and a cup of tea can work wonders!