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-Tutorial:. Modelling a head in Blender- |
Author: |
Viacheslav Slavinsky (svo) |
Date: |
11 November 2001 |
Level: |
intermediate |
Short Description: |
Svo
has done a very nice job on creating this image, and a even better job writing
a tutorial about it. So now everyone with some modeling experience should
be able to model a fairly realistic human head. |
Rating: |
6.8 |
Introduction:. |
Modelling
a head is a rather simple task, although very few can really accomplish good
results at it. The shape of a human head is nothing extraordinary, but it
is a thing that we see many times everyday. That's why anything that's wrong
immediately catches our attention. We feel them instinctively (and especially
those of others!). It is important so, that the head should look right and
be in the right place.
In this tutorial we'll create a rather pretty head. We'll use Blender's
mesh editing tools. Blender is really the best at mesh editing, so why let
this feature go. In Blender it is really easy to create meshes of any degree
of complexity and without any constraints.With the help of other tools you
can get nice smooth surfaces built with very few polygons. |
Many
people try to avoid the sketching stage. However, this is a very important
stage and making a couple of sketches could shave off many hours of work
later. I understand those folks who avoid doing that.. I'm not really good
at pencil myself. But still, I prepared a sketch right in Blender, with the
help of Bezier curves. This is a very rough sketch and later it will
be seen, how unprecise it is. But to start out with, it will be fine. If
you're not a pencil master, picture something of the sort. It will serve
you as a guide when you'll fill the empty space with polygons.
To make a sketch, I have prepared the golden section rulers. Pay attention
to how the face parts are correlated with proportions. The eye cuts are placed
approximately at half the head's height, despite of the common belief that
they grow on the forehead. This is a very common mistake indeed, please avoid
doing so.
Use beziers at full throttle. To make them more attentive, use vector and
independent handles. Select a control vertex, press VKEY to make the vector
handles. HKEY will make them independent and another press of the HKEY will
make them default back again. After you're done with curves, move them back
and forth in depth. |
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To
make the sketch separate from our editing space, yet visible, it is a good
idea to move it into another scene. The following actions show how to do
that. Choose ADD NEW->Empty in the scene selector at the top of the
screen (now you probably see SCE:1 there). Thus we will create a new empty
scene. Now click the selector, pressing shift this time: it's a good idea
to give this scene a name, say, "Sketch".
Press Ctrl-Left, which will move us to the screen called "screen" from "screen.001".
Did you note that "screen" still contains scene "1"? Kinda useful, isn't
it. Select all objects on the scene "1". It will only make sense to leave
the camera unselected.
Now press CTRL-LKEY. Choose "To Scene.." in the menu and select "Sketch"
scene. After we're done with that, all objects from the current scene became
linked with the objects from the another, to where we linked them to. As
a visual proof, we have objects' pivot points turned blue from magenta. The
beauty of this action is in the fact that if we delete those objects from
the current scene, they'll stay in the another and vice versa.
Let us remove everything except for the Camera from the scene "1". Select
all, unselect camera and press XKEY, Erase Selected? Yes.
Now for the kicking part. Go to RenderButtons, F10 and select "Sketch" scene in the "Set" group.
As a result now we see our sketch, but can't spoil it. It's gray and uneditable (or unedible). This is called convenience.
Now, after you've done all of that, if you paid enough attention you would
ask: `But why? Why not rename the first scene into "Sketch", create a new
one, and start working there?'. Answer: because just in case you didn't know
how to link objects between scenes, now you know. Now get down to the business.
Let's model the head and fill some polygons. |
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