The Head

The head was adapted from a sphere which I am lead to believe is quite an easy option for creating a head. I did however run into quite a few problems due to my earlier over-exuberance for polygons!

Now on the example tutorial videos I am following it suggests reducing the number of iterations on the sphere to make it easier to work with and to connect to the face model. I was unable to reduce the iterations on the sphere by any more than 1 due to the amount of polygons I had on my face model that were to be connected to the sphere.

I created a sphere and deleted the polygons I would not need (the front and bottom half of the globe mainly), repositioned and resized the sphere to match my face model. I next set about attaching the vertices around the edge of my face to the edge of the sphere by using the snap toggle to place the vertices in the same position and then using the weld function to secure them to one another.

This worked well for a while until I then came to the temple section near the corner of the eye. Here I did become a little unstuck as I was more than aware of the amount of polygons I had to deal with. I soon found that I had created more than a couple of polygons that had 5 vertices. Some of these I managed to rectify quite quickly using a method I had been shown in the tutorial videos. Others I had to be rather inventive in where I placed the vertices and also I became a bit of a dab hand with the ‘Cut’ tool! This fixed my immediate issue and I was able to connect the face to the sphere successfully.

The head modeling had a few issues regarding the welding as can be seen on the following screen grab, obvious after using the turbosmooth modifier. These were fixed by making sure all of the gaps had been shut by welding the vertices securely. 

I continued to find odd discrepancies with my head model such as a vertex that appeared on the crown of the head for no apparent reason, that was unable to be selected, and turned a quad into a 5 vertex polygon. This I found was due to the symmetry and so I pulled apart the quads from the mirror line and re-positioned back in place, which turned the pentagon back into a friendly quad once again.

Turbo Smoothed Head

My only problem at this point is a fear that I have perhaps given myself a lot more work by yet again increasing my vertex and polygon count significantly. Hey ho, let’s just hope for the best!