Adding detail to the face - Maya Tutorial

- At this point we have the mouth and one eye of the character, now we need to continue refining the face of the character. Now when you model a symmetrical character you don't need to model both hands. You can model one half and then mirror it later. And that's what we're going to do. So I'm going to select my character, turn off my reference here so that we can see what we're doing. And I'm just going to cut my character in half. Probably best to do that from the front viewport, So I'm going to right-click, go onto face mode, select all the faces, on the right side of the character. Awesome. And then just hit delete. So now we have half a character and I'm going to go ahead and model on this half of my character. So let's go ahead and just work on the rest of the face and then we'll go ahead and finalize the body later. Now when I have this character here, I need probably a little bit more detail around the mouth so that we can animate more mouth shapes and I can also probably use a little more detail around the eyes. So I'm going to go ahead and just add in some more edge loops, I'm going to go into insert edge loop tool and just click one edge loop here on the inside of the eye but notice how this flows all the way through the body to the mouth and back to the eye. So it's gone all the way around, see how that edge loop has gone all the way around the body and back to the mouth. Now just as before, when we add an edge loop, it's going to affect the entire character because you notice how we've got this flat spot that we just created and that flows all the way through the character. So we've created some more flat spots that we'll need to model out. I'm going to do that a little bit later, I'm just gong to work on the eyes and the mouth of the character. So let's just play with the face. I'm actually going to insert one more edge loop, right about there. So this gives me enough detail for the eyes and the mouth. In fact I'm going to do one more edge loop here right in the corner of the mouth just to give me a little bit more detail to make the character smile. Now again all of this additional detail has created edge loops that aren't respecting the curvature of the character so we're going to have to model those out but we'll do that later. So once we have all of this, let's go ahead and start putting things in place. I'm going to do a lot of this from my front view. So I'm going to turn off my reference, and you'll see that well, I've got this additional detail that's created some flat spots so let's go into vortex mode and start remodeling the eye sockets. I'm going to take this detail here, pull it over, center this detail and again I'm looking at the outside of the eye of this character and again I'm trying to get all of this detail as evenly spaced around the eye as possible. So I want to make sure these ones here are pretty much in the center. This little bit of detail here can probably come down as can this detail here, we can probably bring that down just a little bit. And then this here, needs to come over, and again we're trying to keep all of this centered. So in each quad here, we've got one, two, three, so we've got a total of 12 edge loops that we're working with. So I want to make sure that everything is spaced about as evenly as we can possibly space it. So this is getting pretty close to what we want. I can certainly tweak this a little more but you get the idea and what we're looking for here is a very round eyehole here. Now we've added this detail and we need to kind of flow it through to the mouth cavity as well. So let's go ahead and move down there. So in this case, I've actually got to turn off x-ray mode so that we can see this a little bit better. And so what I want to do is model in a little bit more of a smile into this character. So I'm going to go ahead and move this over and up. This detail here, probably needs to come over. Now because we're moving it a long distance I'm going to move it along the normal. So I'm going to select this and just move it along the normal so that we've got a little bit more of a straight line from here to here. So I'm kind of trying to get this a little bit more aligned. And then I'm going to move this over a little bit, go back into world space here. And so you can see we're getting this lip here. Now when you start modeling the mouth, you need to pay attention to the gap between all of the edge loops because that's going to determine the curvature of your lips. So right now I've got a smaller curvature here at the top and a bigger one at the bottom. And that's okay for the mouth because what we're doing here is that the mouth usually the lower lip is a little bit bigger. And so I'm going to start pushing this detail over just a little bit. And I just want to space this out so then I have enough room to animate the mouth and get all the shapes that I want. So once this detail's spaced reasonably evenly across the mouth. And now this additional edge loop that I did, I'm going to go ahead and pull that up a little bit because that's going to kind of be part of the corner of the smile. And so this edge here has to come up. I'm going to go into vortex mode here and select this and I want this detail here to just kind of move up a little bit. So I'm going to shift select here and that selects everything but the mouth, so I'm selecting from this point to the last one on the back and I'm going to move that up, out a little bit and again you need to pay attention to the curvature but I'm actually going to tweak that a little bit later, I'm just worrying really about this mouth area here. So now that I've got that, I can start to model in the mouth. And I'm trying to get that shape and also, want to get the bottom lip going. Now I kind of want this character to have a kind of default smile, so I'm actually going to take this top lip and actually kind of pull it down, just a little bit into a smile. And then move the bottom lip up to match. So I'm going to start on the opposite edge there and now we're kind of moving this into a kind of a default smile. So you can see how we're starting to get a little bit of a mouth shape and this is typically a happy character so his default will be a slight smile. And if we smooth that you can see how this is starting to come into play here. So as you can see, we're just adding additional detail to the mouth and the eyes and then we're just fine-tuning them to get exactly the shape that we want. So go ahead and continue to refine your face and then we'll go ahead and move on to organizing that detail on the body next.