Creating the mouth

Were now going to create the mouse patch using splines and loft this process is very similar to how we created the eye. So the first I will do is start off with a little house cleaning again. Were going to double click our nose loft and rename it nose. Now lets just drag and drop it into our patches mouth. Now were going to move into our front view. And we're going to grab a linear spline and create a nine point spline around the mouth. So let's zoom in and get started with that. We'll just click One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine.

Now we go into our side view and adjust that spline, because you can see it is nowhere near our template. Let's just select those points and moving forward and we're going to select our side, side of the mouth there. Just grab my move tool For this and we'll push these points forward. That form the front of the lip. And our bottom most points. Position, and then we'll just sort of smooth these last two points out. So we've got a nice sort of smooth contour for the mouth.

Now we'll do the same thing over here. Just kind of move these two points, so we've got a nice contour. Alright, and now what we'll do is duplicate that spline. We'll hold down shift or command, click and drag to make our next spline. And in our sideview we'll just pull that out a little bit. We'll do that for all these points we'll just pull them out down just a little ways and we'll just check em in our front view, just spreading that geometry out so we've got a nice sort of start for this mouth. Now generally I like working from the outside of the lip out and then I work my way in. It's really a personal preference. It's up to you. If you want to start and work your way into the mouth that's fine, too.

There's no right or wrong way to do this. Next we'll create our loft. And let's select those two splines and throw them into that loft. Now we can see we're still on our display settings set to wire frames so we can actually see what our polygons would look like if we made this editable right now, and obviously, it's way too heavy, so we'll remedy that by selecting our loft, turning off caps, just in case, and we will start to turn down our subdivisions in U, so we've got our nine points around. We'll turn off subdivision per segment, and we'll turn down subdivision V all the way to two, so now we've got a nice looking mesh.

Now let's continue on. We'll grab that bottom spline, hold that command or control, click and drag to create a new one, and let's just keep shaping this mouth. So we'll pull this area up. Shade that area just under the lip, or just over the lip. We'll pull these points up to shape the area under the nose. And let's see what that looks like in the side. And it looks like our middle polygon here, we can actually pull back a little bit. Like so. Just so we're closer to our template. And then up here. Let's just pull those points back like so. Just under the nose. Alright, that's looking good.

We'll create one more for the interior of the mouth. So let's work on this one in the front view. Because what we're going to do is pull this half way down through the lip. And then when we're in our side view, we can actually fill that mass out a little bit better. Let's just move those out. So we got rich, full lips. And on the top lip it actually does the opposite. It kind of moves inwards. We'll just look at that in our 3D view and see how it's coming along. That's not looking too bad so far, so we'll create another spline. And do the same thing. We'll just pull these down. Then go back and work in our template view, just so we know that it's lining up with our template sketch.

And this is our side view. We'll just turn off our loft so we can actually see our points a little bit better. Or we can actually do one better, just set it to, x ray, there we go. Now let's go take a peek in our 3d view and see how that's lookin. Alright, that's not bad. We'll select all our splines. So we can grab all of our points. And sort of keep shaping this a little bit better. Because I do want, the edge of the lip to sort of come in a bit to exaggerate a little. Yeah, that's not bad. And now, what we'll do is create the inside of the mouth. So, we'll select all our points and let's just drag them right back and I'll use the scale tool to flatten them out.

Scale them up a little bit. Because what we're going to do is basically create the interior of the mouth like the inner chamber where your tongue's going to rest. Now, this is kind of an important part of the modeling process because you sort of need to know what the purpose for this model's going to be so if you do intend to have them speaking and talking you are going to want to put a little more work into the inside of their mouth because any errors or inconsistencies you have are going to show up when you try to make this thing talk. For our purposes this is going to work pretty good and I think so because I don't really intend on making this character speak he's going to be the strong but silent type either way we've got a mouth chamber created so if he does at least its not just not a vacum you know we do have something back here and later you know you can model a tongue and insert it or whatever.

But for the moment, this should work just fine. Go to our top view. Just so we know that it slides over and lines up. And we will set this back to regular view. And you can see pretty quickly we've put together a mouth for our character.