Mighty Mesh

And so the messy business of the Meshing can begin! To be honest, I was quite shocked during the Week 2 Lecture... around 80% of the class were already mid-way through meshing, and some were even far enough to be making tweaks on the lips and texture (and Kudos to them for their superb work!) And there was me thinking that we just needed to complete a basic topology... Oops. My aim is therefore to have the entire head modelled by next week (No later!), allowing 2 weeks for tweaking and hopefully animating (Which would be such a tempting thing to do...)

The first bit was relatively straightforward. Using the line tool, it was literally a case of drawing in each quad (by tracing around the topology). With this finished, the next step was to convert one of the splines to a poly, and then attach it to all the other splines (Also helpfully converting them into polys!) The final step was to select all the vertices and 'Weld' them, thereby cementing them together and allowing the entire structure to act as one (As opposed to a large number of independent quads)

Switching the mesh to 'See-Through' (Under the Object Properties) and cracking open a nice can of 'Blue Monday' by New Order, it was time to begin. The first and most obvious step was to pull out the central contours. Selecting all the vertices in the dead centre of the face and aligning them (By hitting the 'X' button next to 'Make Planar' on the right-hand menu under 'Edit Geometry), they were pulled out and aligned with the furthest contours of the face.

The subsequent steps were then a case of moving slowly along the vertices and pulling them out to match the existing locations. Though it's recommended that you work along each 'column' of vertices, I found it a lot easier to work on the 'clusters' of vertices near particular areas of the face. As you can see in the image above, the nose and chin were easy areas to work with and construct. I'd like to note that this was actually my second attempt (I rushed a quicker one earlier in the day to quickly see how everything worked), and in lieu of the first attempt: had tweaked the profile topology. I re-drew the lines so that every blue line on the portrait image had a copy represented on the profile. That way, any vertices on the blue lines on the portrait image could be matched perfectly with the profile one, thereby making things considerably more accurate.

The cheekbones were then pulled in, following the blue guidelines and logical predictions based upon the remaining vertices and the locations of the vertices they were linked to. The hardest part was the eye sockets. Because so much of the topology would overlap on the profile image (As much of it was on the same level), it was hard to precisely pinpoint the exact spots where the vertices should sit. Therefore, it was a case of making an educated guess and tweaking afterwards.

And that's the mesh completed! It's not perfect but it's a healthy start. The advantage is that any vertices in the wrong place can be adjusted any time later on. Next step: restore the mesh to its full opacity and see how it looks!

Not bad; though looking at the edges, you can clearly see a few uneven vertices that are out of place (Though I did not spot them when this was taken) and the eye socket is sticking out a bit too far... but as a second attempt I was content with this at the time...

... that was of course before I switched off the 'show edges mode' and saw the full contours of the face. Sadly, I missed a few screenshots here, but after finishing the mesh I applied the 'Symmetry' modifier to create the other half of the face (It was an exact duplicate, only mirrored) and fired up a 'TurboSmooth' to apply a healthy smoothing algorithm to the face. This is where the problems became apparent...