Human Character Modeling - Creating the Face  

Hello and welcome, I am Zelal from Bangladesh and I have been using 3ds Max since five years. I am going to explain you in this eight part series of tutorial on creating an human character. I feel this tutorials is really complete and allows both novice and intermediate users good amount of access enabling them to follow along quite easily with out leaving them behind. To that extent this tutorial is created not only do we go by this part by part of tutorial, some times for the users with little bit more experience may feel that the tutorial to be very slow and takes too many steps to explain. If you feel it to be very elaborate you can carry on at your own speed by skipping the steps which you may already know how to work with. For you reference, you can also find very nice illustration of anatomical diagrams of human being in the following link: Human Anatomy Online. It would be very useful to keep anatomical images of human being as reference, as you will have an idea about how human body is built. Hope you will find the tutorial useful.

Ok now let us start the tutorial exercise. First let us start with modeling a human face. This part is quite complex and also consumes lot of time to get the desired results. If you are a beginners, don’t panic and worry much about where to start modeling the face. Each person has his own technique and generally plenty of them start with standard box modeling while modeling a head. But in this series of tutorial we shall learn how to model a character by using edge extrusion method. Generally it is up to you to decide with where to start modeling the face, generally I start with an eye, mouth or nose. In this tutorial we are going to start modeling with nose. But before going ahead with this exercise of tutorial series on creating a human character let us get acclimatize and understand the basics of navigating the workspace in 3ds Max. Please keep in mind while going through this tutorial that it has been created for novice/intermediate user rather than guys with loads of experience or guy who is a complete beginner to 3ds max. It is quite usual that even a 3D artist who has reached a good level of proficiency in their workflow will also miss some of those crucial shortcuts that would make life much easier. Since I am going through some of the navigational methods I adopt hoping that it would be helpful and will make your life easier and will more fun by using shortcut keys.

I am assuming that you are using a optical wheel mouse and if not please make sure that you change the old two mouse button to a new optical mouse with wheel, as the wheel is especially useful for number of reasons.

At the right end at the status bar are the buttons that control the display and navigation of the viewports.

  Arc Rotate SubObject: Uses the center of the current sub-object selection as the center of the rotation. The selection remains at the same position in the viewport while the view rotates around its center. The shortcut key is to hold down the Alt key + mousewheel click and hold. We would be using Arc Rotate SubObject out of the three Arc rotate types available, as the rotation will not just move around the selected object, as if we are working at sub-object level and for example if we are working on a group of selected edges, it will rotate around the center the selection.

  Zoom in/Out (Stepped): Controls zooming in and out and the shortcut is to roll up or down the mousewheel.

  Zoom Extents All: Centers all visible objects in all viewport. This control is useful when you want to see every object in a scene in every available viewport. Shortcut is to hit Z key.

  Pan: Pan is used to allow the user to move up and down or side to side in the workspace. Click mousewheel and hold when using pan. If you want to pan constrained to X or Y axis then hold down shift key + Mousewheel click and hold.

  Maximise Viewport (Toggle): It switches any active between its normal size and full-screen size. The keyboard shortcut is Alt+W is especially useful for quick toggles. If you are working in multiple number of viewports and want to expand one of them to full screen you can use the shortcut key as mentioned above.