Welcome to this tutorial. I'm Jon Jones, and I've been using Lightwave since February of 1998. I figured I'd do everyone a favor and write up a tutorial on modeling a head in Lightwave... or at least show how I do it.
This was originally going to be part of a bigger tutorial, but, the face wasn't quite what the guy I was doing this for (Chris Holden) wanted, so I decided that I'd turn this into a little tutorial of its own.
Feel free to email me if you have any comments or praises or whatever.
Files:
I'm going to be modeling a head. I'm not going to go into heavy detail on modeling each part of the face, it's more of knowing what's cool and what looks right, the only way I can think of to learn that is hang around someone cool that knows, and\or study some human anatomy books. Proportion is another major part of modeling a human, you don't want him to have an overly large head or anything, do you? In this tutorial, we're going for realism and coolness.
I was originally going to model this from a sketch but it didn't turn out quite right. Okay, it looks NOTHING like the sketch.
I'm going to give an example of human proportion on a face. There's a basic principle involved, kinda. The way the face is supposed to look is, well, let me explain. The head is an oval. Divide that oval in the middle from left to right. then take the area between the line you just drew in it and the 'chin' area, and draw another line through that. You'll now have three segments. The top segment is the forehead. The middle segment is for the eyes and nose. The bottom segment is for the mouth. That's about all there is to remember, it helps to write it on paper, however. Just keep this in mind as you read and I'll try to as I write.
Let the modeling begin! In a normal situation, I'd load an image into the background of Modeler, but since I have no sketch... I won't.
Okay, for size reference, I loaded another one of my models into the background. In Quake 2, there's a certain size for the model to be and in Lightwave, there's a grid size, for zooming in and out to check how close you are to the model. I usually do this when I start a model. Anyhow, the model's loaded into the background to give me an idea of how big he'll be.
I'm planning on making this model's head a bit bigger than this imp's (whose name is Nore, he's a PPM I'll be releasing soon..), so I'll start a little higher than that. Zooming in...
Now that i've zoomed in, I think I'll move scoot over a little bit (either by zooming on on the area with the line going down the middle or by using the arrow keys) so I can build him right along the line of the grid so mirroring will be easy later. :) Symmetry is GOOD!
Now it's time to make the first poly. I'm going to press the + key, also known as the Add points tool. I'll position the point to the place I want it (it doesn't much matter this early).
Now I'll press 'p' to make a polygon. This is the first part of making a model by using the point-by-point method. Note that the points must still be selected. It depends on the order in which you select them also, if there's more than 3 points. You must select the first point, then the second, then the third next to that, then the fourth, in a square pattern, for it to weld right. This is marking the order in which to weld the points. I never realized this until recently, it is very important to remember.
There's the first polygon! :) Let's duplicate the process right next to this polygon...
There. Now for the second part of point-by-point modeling... welding points. I'm going to select two points in order, then press Ctrl-W to weld them. Repeat for the other two points, then it should look like this.
That's basically all you do in point to point modeling, except you're working towards making a real shape. It'll take some practice, which I won't go over here. I'm going to go ahead and start on the head and get the nose and cheeks done.
Another note, you can add the points clockwise or counter-clockwise, and it will affect which way the poly (or 'normal') will face. If that happens and the poly is facing the wrong way, you go to polygon select mode (Ctrl-H) and select the offending poly, then press 'F' to flip it. :) Back to the nose..
Well! That turned out rather well. :) Something about the cheeks is bugging me though... he looks kind of chubby. I'm going to pull in the verts at the sides of the face and put in some new polys and... this is how he looks now.
Better, but what about those cheekbones? Better fix those. I'm going to pull up some vertices, pull some more out, and suck some more in, then fill out his face a little. Now I just noticed that the nose bothers me... is it just me, or is it a bit too large? I'm going to make it a bit shorter vertically and pull in the sides a bit, and... here it is.
The eyes look too big to me.. I'll fix that and start working on the mouth. I plan for him to have a pretty strong chin.
Looks fine so far. Mouth and chin now.
Looks kinda monkey-like. I'm gonna do the lower lip now, then the chin. Note that I'm working on one side of the face at a time, then knifing it (shift-K) down the middle, and mirroring it (shift-V) along the line in the middle of the front view in Modeler. That's how I work.
WHOA!! That mouth turned out pretty nice. :D I'll be using that one again sometime! :) Ok, I'll explain how I did that. I pulled the bottom part of the upper lip that you saw two images up. I pulled that in and added some polys to the bottom, welded them, then pulled the bottom part of the BOTTOM lip out, then added more polys there to finish it off. Hard to explain, but it seems to have worked fine. :) Now I'm going to add a bit to the chin to make him look less stupid.
Okay, looks fine, except he looks a bit like one of the statues on Easter Island. I know what the problem is, he has no forehead and, thus, looks stupid. I'll add the forehead and start fleshing out the sides, then if he still looks goofy, I'll fix the proportional problems. Speaking of proportion, I'll get into that later. Now, I do the forehead.
Ah, finally, his face is beginning to take shape. He still looks horse-faced though.. hm.. I'm going to start working on the sides of the head then worry about it. If that doesn't fix it, I know what to do, and I'll explain. Now, for some more simple modeling, again, nothing much to say about it.
Hm, looks ok, except there's a strange-looking poly that looks out of place. That's easily fixable. First, I find the two points and select them (see image below). Then I press Ctrl-W to weld them, and poof! They're gone. Now there's a two-point poly that we must find, and destroy. I'd suggest reading my other tutorial on polygon reduction for more information about two-point polys. You can read them on my web page.
That might be a little unclear. In image 1, it has a big red circle around the offending points. In image 2, it selects them. In image 3, it shows them welded (I did both sides). In image 4, it shows what it looks like now.
Now I'm going to resume work on the head. I'm going to leave off the ears as they would be on a skin and not on the model... at least in low-poly modeling. Not that I'm saying this is low-poly.
Note, I've made SEVERAL changes to the face, such as rescaling the mouth and so forth, because I noticed that the length between his nose and his mouth was MUCH too far, unlike the drawing, so I changed it.
I'm going to finish the back of the head now... completely. This will probably have taken 5 or 10 minutes for me, but I don't think you'll notice. ;)
40 minutes later... WHOA! That took a bit longer than I thought. My hand actually fell asleep while using the mouse. That's never happened before. Weird. Anyway, now, I finished the back of the head and a part of the neck. Unless something amazing happens, that's all I'm going to be doing on the model. I'll include the LWO, so go ahead and get that. The link is on the top of this page.
That's the finished, unoptimized product. It came in at exactly 310 polys (faces). Don't reuse this model without my written permission. I don't personally think this is one of my best models, as there are probably many problems with it, including a VERY boxy neck in comparison to the face. The back of his head looks kind of funny to me also, but I did what I could with it. It's also rather stylized and not a good example of a generic human face. It's also COMPLETELY unoptimized so I won't explain how to do that. It's in my polygon reducing tutorial on my web page.
Keep in mind that I'm no expert at modeling, I'm still learning. We all are, no matter how long you've been at it. It's a long, continuous learning process.
Man, my fingers are tired.
Hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial.
Jon "shine" Jones - vertmanip@cander.net