Week 4 Part 2 - Skull and (Really!) Crossbones

You will notice that I have an image of my reference photograph (minus the topography) on the 'Mesh_Model' of my face during this post - this was only due to me experimenting last this week to see how the image was to look before my backtrack into creating the skull and neck area

Of course, this will also mean that when I present the post for Week 5, the images that show how the first application of the reference images and the progress from then on will be divided between screen-shots of me with no skull behind and some that will indeed show me with skull and neck present - hope that makes sense!

The first step that was needed to begin the formation of the skull was to create a 'Sphere Object' and convert it into an 'Editable Poly' This allow me to select the vertices that make up the Sphere itself and compress in the sides so it becomes almost eliptical in shape

( I know, it looks as though I'm a Jet Fighter pilot with a photochromatic visor on - good choice of object-material colour eh)

The image shows that after modifying the sphere into the eliptical form, I then moved the soon-to-be 'Skull_Object' along the 'Z' axis so that the outer edges made contact with my temples and the main central-bulge of the object appeared to collide into my eye-area

I used the HotKeys of CTRL and 4 to see the object in a wireframe-mesh form for ease of manipulation and guaging the formation of its Polygons

 Yes, the reasoning behind the positioning of the 'Skull_Object' shown here is so that when the object's Polygons are clicked and dragged (much easier when the shape of the highlight cursor is changed from a regular square shape into a circular-shaped cursor), it it much easier to select the ones needed to be deleted, rotating the camera around as much as necessary in order to get the ones required (all those in red here!)

Here, I needed all Polygons that covered my face, as well as the first two sections around the objects central emitent-point

 Another tip I use when doing a step like this is to check the 'Check Backfacing' option so that when selecting the Polys that are needed, you are not constantly de-selecting un-needed Polys that just happen to be in the path of your wandering cursor!

 Once I was happy with the Polys that I had selected, all I then needed to do was hit the 'Delete' button

Usually, doing this to a "solid-face" object causes the outer edges to lose their formation at this point, but this deletion was crucial to following the most efficient techniqur of creating the skull and neck area

There is of course a gap of the lower half shown here, but material will be extruded and this will be joined later by means of another previously used technique

 

 I was needing to use the 'Snap_To_Grid' tool as I had during the formation and 'Welding' and my lips

Initially, the tool wasn't recognising that when I highlighted the vertex on the outer edge of the skull (the hairline area) I wanted to 'Snap' to the requeset vertex that was part of the facial hairline - the skull vertex attempted to attach to where two vertices where attached somewhere else on the model!

I thought of a logical solution, which brought me to going into the 'Grid/Snap Settings' where I noticed under the 'Grids' tab, 'Grid Points' was checked, whereas I needed the 'Vertex' option checked

Once I had done that, all that needed to be done was to go into the 'Skull Objects' 'Editable_Poly' sub-menu and make adjustments to the amount of segments there were, just to make sure that the topology/grid of my face model would match up to the grids along the skull itself - makes the next step easier too...!

Once all requeset vertices were attached to one another (I did need to alter the positions of the outer vertices of my facial model as I had them curved too far around and the outermost vertex of the skull couldn't attach without pinching inwards - inherent part of the process when I wasn't planning to re-create the skull!), I could then move onto joining up the lower half of the skull to my chin area

This was, of course using the 'Scale' tool once again - the tool allows the user to select the edges they want extra Polys to be generated from and once pulling them out when holding the CTRL and left-click keys, extra material will be pulled away along the axis of 'Z'  This was I could re-create the lower skull and gradual curvature in the nape of the neck too

After using the scale tool to pull down the Polygons further towards the chin area, I reached the point where, as the image above shows, I couldn't match up the amount of internal edges of the gridlines of the extruded material to the gridlines of the facial-model!

An oversight that was certainly attributed to the discordant setup of the original topology and my own modifications when creating the mesh, I needed to use the 'Snap_To_Grid' tool on vertices that wouldn't have been suitable from one part to another, as displayed here
 

 The next step was to take the edges of the side-portion of the skull and 'Scale' them towards the adjoining (hopefully) edges of the face-model, taking into account that there would need to be a fair amount of adjustment after the extrusion took place

As shown, I decided to pull out a single 'Scale' row of Polygons as I could add in the opposing edges with the 'Cut' tool afterwards

Unfortunately, upon reaching the top part of the skull during the 'Scaling' process, I came across this complication - how was I to manipulate the edges to follow the designated-curvature of the outer edges of my face when all the Polys wanted to do was angle outwards and not snap-to the pre-determined vertices I was trying to get them to attach to...

I overcome this issue by rotating the edges once attached first, to each other, and then created a Poly which then had to incorporate all 4 vertices of the two edges into the facial model chosen by the 'Snap_To_Grid' tool

This part really was taking alot of time up, with each newly assigned vertex and Poly needing to attach somewhere, with many causing a 'Collision' with the modified 'Face Object'

I decided that I needed to cut up the large expanse of Polygons by using the 'Cut' tool, thereby allowing me to adjust the flow of the Splines of the skull in a more competant manner, as well as inherently improving the models natural form

It was at this point that a rather important realization dawned on me...

As not every vertex of the outer edges of the skull was attached to the requeset edges of the face itself due to the 'Snap_To_Grid' tool refusing to pick up on many of said vertices (a result of my misconducted topological study, I regret to add), the Symmetry modifier that is placed on the 'Face_Object' will not recognise the 'Skull_Object' because not every vertex has been 'Welded'!

And so, I had to manually add the 'Symmetry' modifier onto the skull and adjust the settings which Max would have sorted out for me - the tedious task is displayed here...

The metaphorical penny dropped once more when, during the process of selecting the new 'Mirrored' half of the skull shown here to 'Re-Scale' and repositioning it to actually line up momentarilly with the opposite side of my face, the thought occured to me that if the 'Symmetry' mod. didn't work, why on earth wouldn't the 'Mesh_Smooth' mod. follow suit

Sure enough, I had to apply the 'Mesh_Smooth' modifier once more, meaning that it was certain that, as the face and skull had two differing iterations of the modifier, around 70% of the edges were likely not to remotely tesselate with each other - once again, making the process much more complicated for me as I would need to manually monitor the movements of each of the vertices to avoid the scenario of "...moving one so it attachs accurately, only to find another one has moved out of position..."!

 The evidence - as I predicted in a semi-sarcastic manner, Max has indeed caused a major upset with the next step of me assigned to manually tweak positionings of all the outer-edged vertices that are struggling to join with their opposing vertices on the skull...

To avoid even more confusion, I had to add in another iteration of the 'Editable Poly' modifier under the 'Mesh_Smooth' modifier just so that I could work with the vertices without them smoothed and distorted (I wouldn't plan to make this technique any more stressful than it was currently feeling)

 

 After what seemed like hours spent fiddling around with indecipherable vertices around the neck and cheek areas, I had to follow up towards the hairline where I had the sinking feeling that the positionings and placement of vertices and Polygons there were just as, if not more, jumbled

I knew that the final model would need the 'Mesh_Smooth' modifier on to compare with the 'UVW Mapping' that needed to be placed (more on that stage next week) so I enabled it once more - it presented me with the image shown here and I spend another good while adapting yet more vertices in this section to comply with my intended design decisions

 

The neck was comparitively simple to sort out when brought against other items mentioned this week!

As shown, I highlighted edges at the base of the skull, keeping the selection and symmetrical as I could (given the situation) and I was able to pull material downwards to create a neck out of material distinguished from the rest of the 'Skull_Object'

 When the material was pulled downwards, there was a gap underneath the face itself, allowing me to see through the mesh to the rear-ward Polygons - not exactly a feature to keep!

I used a bit of ingenuity and fashioned up a frontal throat and nape section by multi-selection of the front edges running along the bottom of the 'Extruded_MESH' and used the 'Scale' tool to pull another row of Polys upwards, happily creating a natural-looking cleft running down the centre of the section (a benefit of a manually-applied 'Symmetry' modifier at last!)

 

 This ties in with the image/caption below: once the material was 'Scaled' upwards and positioned carefully, I double-checked that there were not leading edges that would protrude outwards from the lower left/right of the facial model - the vertices that were out-of-line were assigned the 'Target Weld' function and snapped to the area I determined, hiding them from view...

 

To improve the sense of realism to the model and to remove the admission that my neck was displayed in true accuaracy, I left-click-highlighted the two outermost Polys of the side of the neck and the whole of the front section and used the rotate tool to pull it backwards and giving the impression of muscle definition and natural undulation in the skin itself

*Okay, this week is over and I can honestly say that I have never had to backtrack so much when modelling an item like this before!

I know that many discrepancies were due to my lack of experience when constructing something like this before, but I'll leave the full excused-conclusion till my last post as a Part 2 to Week 5...*