my head wip, my first model. I'm still trying to get better at splining and placement. Ive been working on this for a while now, trying to make it look the best i can.

*update* first render, tried to implement your suggestions

So far it's a good start.

Hey lazarter, a few pointers... I've found that if you create "loops" around the mouth area that, that will help you out when it comes time to make mouth phonemes. Excellent beginning tho...

Thanks nerazzi! Right now I've made a few changes, hope this one looks better.

great model! Is it a self portrait? It looks similar to your picture in your avatar. It's great to find other hashers near my age. Good luck!

Hey Nerrazzi,

That is a nice mesh there. One thing that I notice though is that in a few places arould the mouth you have the following situation:

There are two hooks, each near each other and going in opposite directions.

I find that when this happens, it is a good idea to re-jig the mesh so that those hooks arn't there. You just have to detatch a few splines here and there and re-join them so that you are left only with normal splines. You get fewer artifacts and a cleaner, more controlable mesh this way.

I hope that you get my meaning and that I havn't just hi-jacked Lazatars thread.

Thanks guys, yah its a self portrait. I'm currently 13.

John, good eye, good eye... I may have went a little, "hook-crazy" around the lower lip / chin area there.

I'm going to rig that face model with some basic mouth phonemes and then create a duplicate with continuous splines in place of the hooks. I'll post the results when I'm finished for folks to compare the differences.

i might be wrong, but the model seems spline heavy to me, especially if you're gonna animate it. consider reviewing the model and removing splines that you don't need.

for instance, four horizontal splines between the nose and mouth seems like too much, as does all those cps between the eyes and on the forhead.

if i had to guess, i'd say you needed the density for the nose, and didn't hook em off, but i think there are whole horizontal and vertical loops that could go away, not harm your model.

-jon

Ok, this is just a rough set of mouth shape / phonemes just to test the mesh...

You can see a link to the .mov here http://www.nerrazzi.com/sitebuildercontent.../makertest3.mov

Thats a nice model nerrazzi, I'm having a hard time with the lips, do you think you can show me how you did it? I'll post an update of where I am so far when I find the time. Thanks

*edit*added your suggestions, not sure if i did them right though

Lazarter, it's going to take practice to be able to get your model's mouth to look and move the way you want it to. You have a good start with your current model but I think your lacking a visual reference such as a rotoscope. Free-handing a human face can be very challenging even for seasoned modelers.

I would suggest snapping a front and side picture of yourself or a friend and importing them into A:M as rotoscopes. From the side view, you can draw a spine outline around edges of the person's face, do the same for the front view, this will give you a better guide to work from as you create your model. From teh front view, draw spline outlines around the eyes and mouth areas. Below is an image of what I'm talking about.

A good key to modeling a human face is to use as use as few splines as possible, this will help create a smooth surface and lessen the amount of work for you when it's time to setup mouth phonemes. Example, in your current image, there are way too many splines concentrated in the mouth region... spread some of those out brother. Make one spline do maximum work in your model. Create a spline around the mouth in the form of a loop, when you extrude from that loop, A:M creates new splines that do a lot of bending for you... take advantage of that. Hope this helps...