Creating My Face

Creating Plane For Images

To Begin I opened 3DsMax and created a plane in the front viewport and changed the amount of height and length segments so there was only 1 on each.
After I had a plane on screen it was time to add a material to it so using the "m" key on the keyboard it opens the Material Editor window. Doing this allows me to add a bitmap to the plane, to do this you simply click on a blank box and click on the small square next to the "diffuse" option and select "bitmap" and then find the Photoshop file within your files.
When you select a file it displays a small image of what the file is you have clicked on, once you select the file that you want you can flatten the layers so that it is one full image or you can select a seperate layer. As I wanted all of the layers I selected flatten image and then I had an image on the plane.
As the image wasnt in the middle of the plane i had to select the option UVW Map on the dropdown list in the modifier panel, doing this allows you to fit the image into the centre of the plane and also make the image a bitmap fit so there is no blur or disfigurement to the image.
When you click on the UVW Map option in the modifier panel it has a "+" next to it if you click on it there is an option called "gizmo" this allows you to move the image so that it is in the position you want it to be, I did this to move the image so just the front of my face was showing on the plane.
The image wasnt very clear on the plane so using the parent option on the modifier panel I changed the self illumination of the image to "100" so that it was very clear on the plane.
The next part I had to do was to copy the image and place it to the side of the plane, to do this i used the select and rotate tool and holding down shift when I had the plane selected and then rotated it 90 degrees to make a copy of the plane. Then moved it to the right of the plane.

Creating a Mesh to Create a 3D face

After the planes had been created it was time to start creating a mesh to model my face with, to do this it was about creating individual quads on my face using the topology I had designed previously.
To make the quads it was best to use a line tool with all the settings set to "corner" and with the snap to grid and snap to vertex so that the lines all joined.
Following the quads that I had created on the topology made making the quads using the line tool alot easier to make as it was just a case of following the lines I had mapped out.
After about 5 minutes all of the quads had been created and joined together successfully it was now time to make one of the quads an "editable poly" by right clicking on the line and selecting convert to an editable poly.
Doing this made the quad turn blue making it a solid object, the next step was to turn all of the other lines into an editable poly aswell.
To do this I selected the "Attach" option but selecting on the options part next to the word "Attach" and then selected all of the lines.
Doing this made all of the lines (quads) I had created become polys ready to be manipulated into the shape of my face.
By right clicking on the top left of the area you are working on in 3DsMax you can turn on the edged faces tool to show all of the edges of the quads you have created using the line tool.
Then by going into the modify panel you can select the option "vertex" and it displays all of the individual points of reference on the quads so usually the four corners of each quad.
Then by clicking and dragging the mouse cursor over all of the points I selected the settings button next to the "weld" button and welded all of the vetex to each other so that if one vertex was moved the rest would move accordingly.
Then by right clicking on the welded mask I selected the option "Object Properties" and changed the tick box to ticked for see through object so that I can see through the mask and see the face behind it.
Once I could see through the object it was time to start moving each of the points out so that it would start to make the form of my face, to do this successfully I needed to change the viewports so it only showed the side and front viewports so I could click on the vertex on the front and then move it on the side view to the reference point on my face.
This process takes quite a long time but if you segment the face it makes life a little easier I started with all the furthest points of my face first then did around the bottom of my eye and cheek.
Once I had completed the cheek and bottom of my eye I completed the bottom of my face quite quickly by using each vertex as a reference point for each other so that the movement down and around my face for each quad was smooth and accurate.
The hardest part was to make around the eye accurate and effective and flow around the shape of my eyebrow. Using the click and drag technique from clicking the vertex on the front image and dragging it accross on the side image helps get a more accurate shape and structure to the face.
Once I had completed around my eye it was a case of finishing the forehead and making a few slight adjustments to the rest of the face so that I was happy with the shape and angles of the quads.
Once I was happy I zoomed out of the images and right clicked on the object and turned off the see through image tick box.
This image shows the shape of the face without being see through and it shows the base object for editing into my face.
Next step is to start modelling in detail.