Modeling the head shape - 3ds Max Tutorial

- [Instructor] With the lower half of our robot taken care of then, we are ready, in this video, to make a stab at modeling our robot's head. Open the scene explorer, then let's click on the eyeball icon to hide the final_model_bottomlayer, and then click to unhide the final_model_toplayer. Now this will reveal all of the high poly meshes that form the upper part of our robot. So the head, the piston and its components, and the shovel. Let's left click to select the high poly head mesh, and at the bottom of our UI, click the isolate button. And then use the zoom x stand tall command just to reframe our mesh in each of our view paths. As we are going to want to create a sphericalish shape head, I am actually going to start with a box perimeter, as this will give us a much better topology flow in the end. And especially so when creating low poly models. In the create tab then, let's click to engage box creation. Switch the creation method over to cube and then left click and drag in the perspective view part. We can then press the m key to open up the material editor and design our modeling material to the mesh, meaning we can move on now and adjust its parameter settings. In the modify tab, let's set the length, width, and height spinners for the box to 30 centimeters with segment values of one. After which, we can add an OpenSubDiv Modify to the mesh, setting its iterations value to two. Now this will give us plenty of resolution with which to make our low poly head. Before we go ahead and add any more modifiers however, we will want to turn off the isoline display option on the open socket modifier. Now I do this because sometimes when collapsing the mesh down we can run into a glitch whereby we always see the isolines, rather than the geometry's mesh pitches themselves, which is very bad of course, when doing any kind of precise modeling. With that done, let's add a relaxed modifier to the stat, setting its relaxed value, all the way up to one, and add a spherify modifier in order to create the spherical shape that we want. Then finally, add an edit poly modifier to the geometry. Let's press the alt and a keys in order to engage the align tool, and as we want the box to occupy the same space as our high poly reference mesh, let's select that in the view path. We can then choose the center to center option and click OK. In the right view port, after entering polygon subobject mode, let's drag a marquee selection around the bottom cluster of polygons, and we can easily identify them as the flow of the edges changes because of having used a box to create the sphere. Turning on the scale tool via the arc eater, we can click and drag on the y-axis to flatten out our polygons, and then, just move the polygons down and match to the base of the high poly object. Jumping into the top view port, we can scale on the yx plane, again to roughly match the high poly mesh. Coming into element subobject mode, let's select all of the mesh, and again, in the top view, scale on the xy plane until we are encompassing the high poly geometry. Although we may need to scale in just the y-axis a little or move these verts up so that we have similar proportions to the high poly outline. In vertex of object mode, we want to select the next row of vertices up from the base, and scale these up if needed. And again, let's rescale our base row of vertices if things are not quite matching up. We can also move our second row of vertices down if it's a slight layer, so it's to get a more even distribution of polygons. Next up, we want to make sure that the base of the head will fit nicely to the hood mesh, and so let's come into polygon subobject mode and drag a selection around the bottom of the mesh. Holding down the alt key, we can deselect the polygons that we don't want. After which, we can hit the delete key. Coming into borders of object mode, let's click to select our newly created border and then click to apply the spherify modifier. We can then switch our right view to a front view and maximize it with the alt delete keys and add an edit polymodifier to the start. Here we can come into vertex of object mode and click and drag to select the middle three verts of our second row. As we want to match these to the diamond shaped details that we see on our high poly mesh. We can then engage the scale tool, and after making sure that we have the edge constraint turned on, so that we can keep the shape of our sphere intact, let's scale down on the x-axis, so that we match the high poly mesh. Moving them in y as well. We want to do the same on our next row of verts, so scale them out on the x-axis, and then move them down on the y until the central vertex is sitting at the center of the eye piece. We may just want to use the snap functions at this particular section. Do keep in mind here that the actual position of your vertices may differ from mine, depending on just how large your box is. On the next row of verts, let's again scale out on the x and move in the y, and then finally, on the highest set of vertices, we will scale in on the x-axis, but then hold down the alt key to deselect the middle vertex, and then move these two side verts up slightly and scale them in. In polygon subobject mode, let's select the six interior polygons on the front and back of the mesh. Shift + click the inset tool on the ribbon, and then enter a value of one centimeter and click OK. We have the base of our head set up now, so let's move on to the next video where we will adjust the overall shape of the head and then create the eye section as well.