Week3. Extending Head

At this point the face excluding the eye and mouth part is finished. The next step involved extending the face to full head model. Which includes creating the skull, bottom of the chin and area around the neck. First I have started to create the top and back of the head. To speed up the process I managed to use standard sphere primitive. I created simple sphere in front viewport and moved and rotated it around to match the head. Then I reduced number of sphere segments in modifier panel and scaled sphere using scale tool to match the shape of the head. Afterwards I converted sphere to editable polygon and removed the polygons that would not be appropriate for the model as well as polygons that would be duplicated by the symmetry modifier after connecting it the existing face mesh. Then I moved vertices that are going to be welded to top off face mesh using a soft selection tool.

The created part had to many polygons. This issue was solved by selecting every second edge of the polygon set nearest to ear and looping them around. Then in edit geometry rollout I selected collapse tool which removed selected edges and connected edges nearest to each other. This simplification of the mesh helped to save a lot of time in future extension of the mesh.

The extension of the head continued with going back to reference image and drawing few more guidelines for the neck. Then I have kept on creating new polygons by selecting and dragging the edges while holding shift button. I was adjusting new polygons in vertex mode by moving vertices to keep polygons flow and match them with already existing face mesh. I have switched back to the original face mesh after I finished creating side and top of the head. Creating new polygons from the original mesh appeared to be an easier because of the flow and position of vertices. I started from the chin to the neck using same method of selecting edges, copying them and then repositioning. Then I continued to extend polygons on the neck and match them with new head mesh.

Once finished with moving all the vertices and placing edges I connected the two separate meshes with the attach tool from element edit geometry rollout. Now i had the full head model with neck as a single mesh object. The final step was to welded the duplicating vertices from the connections points. This was done using target weld and weld tools from the vertex edit geometry rollout.