Please Note

Just to say some of the items in my files may be hidden (such as the copied spline cage for the hair).
 Thank you

Using Morpher

To use morpher with my hair spline cage in the scene kept causing 3DS Max to crash and so I deleted my hair and created 3 copies of my head model and using the morpher modifier on the original head I was able to create three different movements on the face. I opted for an open mouth, raised eyebrows and an attempt at a smile. Unfortunately just before I turned my original model into an editable poly, I forgot to reselect the turbo smooth option and unfortunately the short animation I ended up with has lost the lifelike feel. However I am pleased with this experiment with morhper and hope to redo it using the turbo smooth and sorting out the other problems with the movements.

One issue to mention is that when rendering the final submission with the hair in view the render does take a very long time. I have had to resort to rendering my final image without hair due to the length of time it takes, please see earlier blog posts for rendered pictures with the hair!

Unfortunately I no longer have the Original images, please refer to my previous hand in, Thank you.

Rendering Time

Each time I tired to render my model from adding the eye constraints I came across incredibly slow rendering times as you can see below it took 45 minutes to render just one scene and I am not entirely sure why, assuming that it has something to do with the amount of information in the scene since I had also added a light within the scene.

This is my model at a much better state than previously although as I said I would particularly like to work more on it and perhaps begin another just to improve my skills.

Hair Again

So I was happier with the look of my model and the major problem for me was the hair not looking very realistic and so I tried a couple of techniques so improve it - firstly the hair and fur modifier put directly onto the head model. This I found quite tricky to gage what shape my hair would take if I had had an electric shock!

 I then came across a couple of youtube videos displaying hair spline cages used in conjunction with the cloth modifier to create an animated hair style. Unfortunately although I could find plenty of examples of great hair on 3d models I couldn't find any tutorials to help me out. Instead I had a go at trying for myself.

I managed at least to create a flannel on the head look!

I then cam across a blog that suggested attaching the cloth modifier to the actual spline cage itself. It said to create a copy and manipulate it this way and then use skin mapping to allow it to affect the original spline cage.

The main issue with this was that that was all the blog said and I got stuck at this stage. I managed to create a nice flow within the copied spline cage when simulating locally although when it came to skin mapping I got very lost! I hope to carry on with this model and get it to a better stage, since after working within the Finchingfield project I have found an enjoyment in organic modeling!

Correcting the Issues

Wow it seemed like such a long time ago I was looking at this model. Time away has been beneficial I think considering I can now look at my model and see just how flawed it is! To start with I began pulling out the vertices around the jaw and cheek areas. My model was rather thin and needed filling out a lot and also the egg head needed to go!

I had a few disasters with the UVW mapping and so I made full use of my friend Autoback!

After playing with the actual head model to make it more lifelike I had another go at the eye which was slightly more successful than before to say the least!

I watched a couple of youtube tutorials and remade the model of the eye using some of the techniques I had picked up on modeling the Finchingfield animation. I created a white, inverted iris, pupil and cornea. 

I then added materials, manipulating the specular for the white of the eye, using UV map for the iris bitmap (which I used a lot in the group project!) I also gave the pupil self-illumination so that it did not reflect the light source that I placed in the scene and made the cornea transparent.

When placing the eyes back into the head I realised that put them into the correct position I needed to significantly alter the eyelids. I did this and quickly ran into the issue of not having a eyelid 'lip' on which eyelashes sit. I tried to modify the head model but of course the UVW mapping was affected and so as a way around this issue I created a separate eyelid lip, connecting it to the eye via the vertex snapping tool  and also added turbo smooth to that so that it fit perfectly against the head model.

This is how the eyes looked in the end

I also toned down the specular map in photoshop by adjusting the opacity of the highlights I had created. Just these small but significant changes made a dramatic change to my model. 

After making the eyes look a little better I then added a lookat constraint onto each eye so that I could manipulate them independently and together to achieve some animation in the face.